Progressive 'Thought-Blockers': Racism--How the Left amasses and consolidates political power

(Hat tip: KimR) - Rather than being a racial healer, Barack Obama has presided over and at times stoked more racial divisiveness than we have seen in a long while. Just in the last year we’ve had Black Lives Matter marches and verbal assaults of Democratic candidates, the Oscar protests over the absence of nominated black actors, Ivy League university students marching over “microagressions” no one else can see, and the still simmering protests and agitation over police shootings of black men. Driving it all is our duplicitous and malignant national racial discourse. Read more at Frontpage Magazine Read More......

Krauthammer: GOP has right to fight over Supreme Court nominee

Let's understand something about the fight to fill the Supreme Court seat of Antonin "Nino" Scalia. This is about nothing but raw power. Any appeal you hear to high principle is phony — brazenly, embarrassingly so. --In Year Seven of the George W. Bush administration, Sen. Chuck Schumer publicly opposed filling any Supreme Court vacancy until Bush left office. ("Except in extraordinary circumstances." None such arose. Surprise!) Today, he piously denounces Republicans for doing exactly the same for a vacancy created in Year Eight of Barack Obama. Read more at Review Journal Read More......

GOP meeting erupts over Ex-Im power move

Conservative frustration over Republican efforts to force a House vote on reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank boiled over Wednesday during a contentious GOP meeting. --Members of the conference’s conservative wing criticized Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-Tenn.) at the meeting for moving to file a discharge petition to bring a vote on legislation renewing the embattled bank’s charter for five years, after it lapsed June 30 because of Tea Party opposition.

Read more at The Hill
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Emails Show That Unlike Gov. John Kitzhaber, Cylvia Hayes Had No Doubts About Holding On To Power

Last week, WW published emails showing that former Gov. John Kitzhaber had been ambivalent about seeking re-election, and that he worried that he lacked the energy and desire to continue.

The emails show that, while Kitzhaber wavered, then-first lady Cylvia Hayes did not—she wanted him to run again and to give her an even larger role in his administration.

Read more at Willamette Week
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson lifts veil on Establishment GOP's Stockholm Syndrome

In what was clearly intended to be a snarky, hip rebuke of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Tea Party supporters, and other limited government advocates, the Washington Post's domesticated, in-house “conservative” Michael Gerson inadvertently exposed his true colors. By so doing, he articulated the gaping divide in the Republican ranks.  After a string of juvenile insults of various leaders of the limited government movement, Gerson bottom lined it, approvingly quoting from a recent National Affairs piece by Phillip Wallach and Justus Myers:  Tea Partiers and other limited government advocates "seek to break with the past in a very different manner – repudiating 80 years of institutional development and reinventing American[sic] as a nation that rejects the substantive role for regulation or a social safety net.”

Read more at the Washington Examiner Read More......

Victory! A Win for Constitutional Separation of Powers

Prefacing the introduction of todays' I Spy Radio guest, Shannon Goessling, Executive Director and Chief Legal Counsel for Southeastern Legal Foundation, Karla Davenport writes,

This week has been a great week to be an American. It started with the exciting ruling by the Supreme Court that slapped down the EPA and Obama administration's abuse of executive power. Long-time listeners of I Spy have been following this EPA lawsuit for nearly four years. At stake was the complete overreach of the Executive branches desire to regulate CO2 gas by rewriting the Clean Air Act without Congressional approval. Had the Supreme Court not struck this down, it would have continued to allow this president, or any future president, to simply rewrite laws. How big of a win was this? By Wednesday, Speaker John Boehner found his spine and announced plans to sue the Obama administration.

And then on Thursday, in a stunning 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court again slapped down the administration's abuse of power by ruling he did not have the authority to declare, king-like, when the Senate was in recess. Could this be the start of the other branches reasserting their own power?

Tune in this week to hear how big of a victory this was and what was at stake had they lost, how this opens the door to other actions, and a reminder that success happens by hard-fought steps and the iron determination to never, ever give up. Share in the victory not just of the Southeastern Legal Foundation's triumph but of the goose-bumps-inducing thrill of our system--finally!--working the way it ought.

Busy on Saturday or Sunday? Not a problem. Monday, after the show airs, you can go to our webpage www.ispyradio.com and download it from our “latest shows” page.

Read More......

Supreme Court Rules Unanimously Against Obama for 12th and 13th time Since 2012

Did you know the Obama administration’s position has been defeated in at least 13 – thirteen — cases before the Supreme Court since January 2012 that were unanimous decisions? It continued its abysmal record before the Supreme Court today with the announcement of two unanimous opinions against arguments the administration had supported. First, the Court rejected the administration’s power grab on recess appointments by making clear it could not decide when the Senate was in recess. Then it unanimously tossed out a law establishing abortion-clinic “buffer zones” against pro-life protests that the administration supported (though the case was argued by Massachusetts attorney general Martha Coakley).

Read more at National Review
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

For Earth. For Humanity. For Freedom.

For decades the Green Movement has claimed that Earth is threatened by the activity and even the existence of mankind. Green policies dictate that the noble response is relinquishing our liberties to "save" the planet from peril. Award-winning filmmaker JD King sets off on a cinematic journey to challenge these Green philosophies, and overturn the tables on issues like carbon emissions, climate change, over-population, natural resources, and unmasks the UN's Agenda 21 plan. BLUE casts a bold new vision: that through greater freedom we can realize a fuller potential for our fellow man and this beautiful blue planet we call home. BLUE BEATS GREEN.

Watch the official BLUE trailer at BlueBeatsGreen.com.

Read More......

Obama's Second Term Transformation Plans

By Steve McCann - The most significant accomplishment of Obama's first term is to make Congress irrelevant. Under the myopic and blindly loyal leadership of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats have succeeded in creating an imperial and, in a second term, a potential dictatorial presidency. Read more at American Thinker...

(Hat tip: Carolyn Webb and others)  Read More......

The scientific technological elite [Eisenhower's other warning]

 Republished 6/4/2012
AMERICAN THINKER, 12/7/2009 by Robert W. Ball - President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous 1961 farewell address contained more than an admonition about the danger of an expanding "military-industrial complex." That speech was also an early warning of the current unholy alliance between the government and a scientific community dependent on the government for its funding.

"...(In) the technological revolution during recent decades...research has become central...complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government...the solitary inventor... has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields...

...the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded....we must...be alert to the...danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite." [ii]

Read more at American Thinker... Read More......

Beck: And the scariest Obama line of the night is...

GLENN BECK, 1/25/2012 - SOTU: Obama wants government power consolidated under Executive Branch - Last night [Tuesday], Obama said, “The executive branch also needs to change. Too often, it’s inefficient, outdated and remote. That’s why I’ve asked this Congress to grant me the authority to consolidate the federal bureaucracy so that our Government is leaner, quicker, and more responsive to the needs of the American people.” He sounded like someone trying to destroy the Constitution than someone who swore to uphold it. Read more at glennbeck.com...

More Executive Power? Imparitive... contact your Congressman and Senators to prevent them from neutering themselves (and us)! --bc Read More......

Byron York: Has Obama become bored with being president?

WASHINGTON EXAMINER.COM, 1/29/2010 by Byron York, Chief Political Correspondent - This is about the time Barack Obama becomes bored with his job. ∴ He's in his second year as president, and he's discovered that even with all the powers of office, he can't do everything he wants to do, like remake America. Doing stuff is hard. In the past, prosaic work has held little appeal for Obama, and it's prompted him to think about moving on. ∴ Begin with his first serious job, as a community organizer in Chicago. Obama got a little done, but quickly became frustrated with small achievements. "He didn't see organizing making any significant changes in things," Jerry Kellman, the organizer who hired him, told me in 2008. ∴ What Obama wanted was political power, and that is what sent him to Harvard Law School. "He was constantly thinking about his path to significance and power," another organizer, Mike Kruglik, told me. "He said, 'I need to go there [Harvard] to find out more about power. How do powerful people think? What kind of networks do they have? How do they connect to each other?'" Read more at the Washington Examiner... Read More......

Barone: Misusing Knowledge to Expand Government Power

A Commentary by Michael Barone, 12/10/2009 (via Rasmussen) - "Knowledge is becoming more specialized and more dispersed, while government power is becoming more concentrated," writes economist Arnold Kling in his new book,"Unchecked and Unbalanced." "This discrepancy creates the potential for government to become increasingly erratic and, as a result, less satisfying to individuals."

"Less satisfying to individuals" is a mild way to put it. In a recent Annenberg focus group, pollster Peter Hart asked Philadelphia suburbanites to write the name that came to mind when they thought of Congress. A retired auto executive and 2008 Obama voter wrote, "Satan." When asked why, he said, "Because I wasn't sure of the correct spelling of 'Beelzebub.'"

Kling's point is that such disenchantment is inevitable when government officeholders make sweeping decisions about matters on which they lack, and only a few specialists have, detailed knowledge. Which is what Congress and the Obama administration have been busy doing these past 11 months.

Consider the 2,000-plus-page health care legislation now before the Senate. There is coherent debate on abortion coverage because it's a discrete issue easily isolated from the rest of the bill that raises concerns among people with conflicting strong moral beliefs.

But any abortion provision would have less effect on real life than dozens of other provisions in the bill. The Congressional Budget Office, drawing on specialist knowledge, tells us the Senate bill would result in 10 million people losing employer-provided insurance and increased premiums for buyers of individual health insurance. And the CBO says the bill would not bend the cost curve downward.

Democratic leaders want to pass something, almost anything, for fear of political damage. They want to give government even more power over one-sixth of the economy, and over ordinary people's health care. To that end, they have been happy to game the CBO's scoring system, misusing specialized knowledge to achieve political ends.

On the issue of carbon emissions, the e-mails hacked from Britain's Climate Research Unit show even leading specialists in climate research have been busy manipulating data and suppressing alternative views in pursuit of political ends. Their goal, and that of the Democrats backing cap-and-trade legislation, is government control over energy production and distribution essential to all of the economy.

The Environmental Protection Agency's designation of carbon dioxide as a pollutant is an attempt to give EPA bureaucrats such control in the likely event that the Senate fails to pass something like the bill the House passed last June.

So politicians are acting either in ignorance of specialist knowledge or by manipulating and misusing it in the conviction that central planners can organize and control human behavior better than individuals can through markets and voluntary action operating under the rule of law.

History provides copious evidence that this conviction is mistaken. Writing in Policy Review, economists Paul Gregory and Kate Zhou compare the success of market reforms in China and their failure in Russia. They point out that reform in China was bottom-up: Peasants started producing food for private sale and, as markets thrived, Communist leader Deng Xiaoping winked at their rule-breaking and changed the rules. The economy mostly thrived.

In contrast, reform in Russia was top-down: Mikhail Gorbachev changed the rules, but that allowed apparatchiks to gobble up state industries and created new monopolies, over which Vladimir Putin's government re-established control. The economy mostly stagnated.

The Democrats' health care and cap-and-trade bills are classic top-down legislation. Many inside players have bought into the changes and are preparing to game the new systems. Far from banishing lobbyists from Washington, Barack Obama has provided them with enormous amounts of new business.

An alternative approach was taken in George W. Bush's major domestic legislation. Tax cuts, the education accountability bill and the Medicare prescription drug benefit law opened up areas where markets and incentives could operate. Costs came in lower and revenues higher than projected. An economy stalled by recession proved capable of creating new jobs without direction from central planners.

Polls have shown that in the last 11 months, as Americans have started to think hard about Democratic proposals, they have become less confident in government's ability to direct society. Underlying the angry responses in focus groups and tea parties is an appreciation that problems can best be addressed by widely dispersed people with specialized knowledge operating in a predictable framework. Not by central planners acting in ignorance of or by manipulating specialized knowledge.


Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner.

COPYRIGHT 2009 THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

[Emphasis added] Read More......

Pattern of Corruption: Robert Creamer's blueprint

In an earlier post, we linked to Big Government's report on left-wing activist, Bob Creamer and his wife, Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, who attended President Obama's White House State Dinner. Creamer is the author of the 2006 book, written while serving a prison term for fraud, Listen to your Mother, Stand Up Straight! How Progressives Can Win. David Axelrod described the book as, "...a blueprint for future progressive victories." On 12/7 and 12/8/2009 Glenn Beck featured 11-steps of Creamer's blueprint on his FNC show. See if this blueprint strikes you as an earnest attempt to improve health care in America or a strategy to take absolute control of health care (or any segment of the U.S. economy) to acquire immense immutable power? Blueprint follows:

THE BLUEPRINT (per Beck)
Passages from Creamer's Listen to your Mother, Stand Up Straight! How Progressives Can Win are in "quotes". Rough notes on Beck's commentary or clips are in italics. --bc

1. RIGHT – “We must create a national consensus that health care is a right, not a commodity; and that government must guarantee that right.”
   
   
2. CRISIS – “We must create a national consensus that health care system is in crisis.”
   
   
3. DISCREDIT - “Our messaging program over the next two years should focus on reducing the credibility of the health insurance industry and focusing on the failure of private health insurance.”
   
   
4. DEALS – “We need to systematically forge relationships with large sectors of the business/employer community.”
   
   
5. SCARE POLS – “We need to convince political leaders that they owe their elections, at least in part, to the groundswell of support of universal health care, and that they face political peril if they fail to deliver on universal health care in 2009.”
   
   
6. CONSENSUS – “We need not agree in advance on the components of a plan, but we must foster a process that can ultimately yield consensus.” (Just pass it quickly – it doesn’t matter what’s in it [do legislators know what’s in the 2000+ page bills?], we can tweak it later)
   
   
7. ORGANIZE – “Over the next two years, we must design and organize a massive national field program.” (Unions, Organizing for America, ACORN, HCAN, AARP, SEIU, etc. / SEIU? has been delivering political beat downs to Wal-Mart and most recently Comcast)
   
   
8. CHURCH/UNIONS – “We must focus especially on the mobilization of the labor movement and the faith community.” (Check church websites – three clicks and you’re on the HCAN website.)
   
   
9. ACORN, ETC. – “We must systematically leverage the connections and resources of a massive array of institutions and organizations of all types.” (Barack Obama on Chicago Public Radio in 2001: “…One of the, I think tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing… and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.” )
   
   
10. $ - “To be successful, we must put in place commitments for hundreds of millions of dollars to be used to finance paid communications and mobilization once the battle is joined.” (Tides Foundation, SEIU spent $60M to elect Obama, HCAN has contributed heavily to promot Obamacare)
    
    
11. CREATE FEAR – “To win we must not just generate understanding, but emotion, fear, revulsion, anger, disgust.” (Obama leveled this at doctors… ripping out tonsils and cutting off feet for money. Calling Tea Party goers angry mobs, etc. Pelosi and Obama administration has stirred up all these tactics while pointing at the right and accusing them of fear tactics.)

Do you recognize these steps? Have they happened? Yah, they have... every stinking one! --bc Read More......

Eisenhower: The scientific technological elite

AMERICAN THINKER, 12/7/2009 by Robert W. Ball - President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous 1960 farewell address contained more than an admonition about the danger of an expanding "military-industrial complex." That speech was also an early warning of the current unholy alliance between the government and a scientific community dependent on the government for its funding.

"...(In) the technological revolution during recent decades...research has become central...complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government...the solitary inventor... has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields...

...the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded....we must...be alert to the...danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite." [ii]

Read more at American Thinker...

Arrrghh... we were warned! --bc Read More......

Bill would give president emergency control of Internet

CNET, 8/28/2009 - Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet. ∴ They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency. ∴ The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license. Read more at CNet... Read More......

Marina Kalashnikova’s Warning to the West

GLOBAL ANALYSIS 7/17/2009 by J. R. Nyquist - Meet Marina Kalashnikova: a Moscow-based historian, researcher and journalist. Last August she criticized foreign “experts” for suggesting that a conflict with Moscow will not happen because Russia’s elite is too closely associated with the West. According to Kalashnikova, “The West does not care to wake from the dream of its wishful thinking, even when Moscow turns to … reanimating Stalin’s cult of personality together with the ideology of the Cheka [i.e., the secret police].” Read more at Global Analysis... Read More......