President Obama has always disliked free speech as a general matter, particularly for those who oppose him. He frequently suggests that those who disagree with him simply lack the power of reason; he constantly attacks those who do not bow to his opinions. In the last month alone he has directly castigated the Supreme Court (it would be “unprecedented,” he said, for them to strike down Obamacare); Rush Limbaugh (he called up Sandra Fluke to tell her how out of line Limbaugh was); and Congress (if they don’t act on whatever it is he wants, he will go it alone).

But he has one problem: the First Amendment does not allow him, as president, to use the power of government to fight his enemies. Obama’s solution to this dilemma lies in 501(c)3 charitable organizations working in close tandem with the federal government.

President Obama is being forced to modify his absurdly wrong claim that it would be “unprecedented” for the Supreme Court to strike down the new health care law.

He made that statement April 2 in a news conference:

Obama, April 2: Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.

As any number of others were quick to point out, there is ample precedent for the Supreme Court voiding laws passed by Congress. In fact, overturning unconstitutional laws has been part of the Supreme Court’s job description for more than two centuries.

And the health care law wasn’t passed by a “strong” majority, either. In the House, the final vote was 219 to 212, with all Republicans and even 34 Democrats voting in opposition.

NBC News staffers who have been working on the Trayvon Martin story for several weeks in Florida were at first "in shock" over the incident, and later furious, another source, who is an NBC producer, told Reuters.

Public pressure has been building on the network to fully explain the incident - which critics charge has inflamed racial tensions in an already volatile situation.

On Thursday, a New York Post editorial characterized the edited 911 call as "pretty damning evidence of willful misconduct by NBC News" and suggested that racial violence could ensue over irresponsible news coverage.

Television news veterans in New York said they were baffled over how the error came to be broadcast given the intense vetting such a sensitive story would normally get at a major network such as NBC.

President Obama’s longtime spiritual leader, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has endorsed a controversial anti-Israel group that seeks to delegitimize Jewish historical connections to the city of Jerusalem.

There is no gray area about whether Mr. Obama’s request to delay major diplomatic relations until after the election was motivated entirely by his own political considerations, an uncomfortable reality reflected in the beginning of the repartee between the two presidents. Mr. Obama explained, “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him [Mr. Putin] to give me space.” Mr. Medvedev replied, “I understand your message about space. Space for you … .”

The insidious nature of this back and forth is due to the fact that Mr. Obama didn’t know a microphone was on and thought his conversation with the foreign leader was confidential. That he would be so forthcoming about making U.S. national security second fiddle to his personal quest for re-election is startling. That his candor benefits Russia - a strategic competitor to the United States and former longtime enemy - is scary. Mr. Obama already signed the ill-advised “New Start” Treaty, which allows Moscow to expand and modernize its nuclear stockpile while America unilaterally cuts down our own arsenal. It is the president’s self-centeredness, combined with a cavalier lack of respect for the global perception of U.S. power, that has many security analysts speculating about a rash October surprise to help his electoral bid.

Celebrated Democratic political consultant James Carville said Friday that a poor economy, persistent unemployment, an ineffective communications team and the president's own inability to connect with voters make Barack Obama beatable in the fall elections.

"We have a pretty weak incumbent," said Carville, who helped a scrappy Bill Clinton to an unlikely 1992 election.

Is it me? Or is the ongoing argument that the individual mandate in Obamacare is somehow the same as some states requiring proof of insurance when registering an automobile just absurd?

Can you imagine if buying car insurance was actually similar to what’s in Obamacare? It would be like absurdist theater.

Obama's online campaign machine in Chicago has a payroll of more than $3 million per month, largest staff ever assembled for a presidential race

Drill here and you stanch the hemorrhage. You keep those dollars within the U.S. economy, repatriating not just wealth but jobs and denying them to foreign unfriendlies. Drilling is the single most important thing we can do to spur growth at home while strengthening our hand abroad.

Instead, Obama offers what he fancies to be the fuels of the future. You would think that he’d be a tad more modest today about his powers of divination after the Solyndra bankruptcy, the collapse of government-subsidized Ener1 (past makers of the batteries of the future) and GM’s suspension of production — for lack of demand — of another federally dictated confection, the flammable Chevy Volt.

Deterred? Hardly. Our undaunted seer of the energy future has come up with his own miracle fuel: algae.

Why, explained Obama, “we can grow it right here in the United States.” (Sounds like a miraculous local find — except that it grows just about everywhere on earth.) Accordingly, yet another $14 million of taxpayer money will be sprinkled on algae research by Steven Chu’s Energy Department.

This is the very same Dr. Chu who famously said in 2008 that he wanted U.S. gas prices to rise to European levels of $8-$10 a gallon — and who on Tuesday, eight months before Election Day, publicly recanted before Congress, Galileo-style.

Who do they think they’re fooling? An oil crisis looms, prices are spiking — and our president is extolling algae. After Solyndra, Keystone and promises of seaweed in their gas tanks, Americans sense a president so ideologically antipathetic to fossil fuels — which we possess in staggering abundance — that he is utterly unserious about the real world of oil in which the rest of us live.

The New York Times is being accused of having a double standard when it comes to questioning religion, after it ran an ad calling on Catholics to leave their church, but nixed a nearly identical ad aimed at Muslims.

The newspaper published an ad from Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation on March 9 which asked Catholics, “why send your children to parochial schools to be indoctrinated into the next generation of obedient donors and voters?” The ad went on to call loyalty to the faith misplaced “after two decades of sex scandals involving preying priests, church complicity, collusion and cover-up going all the way to the top.”

But in a story first reported by The Daily Caller, when Pamela Geller, a blogger and executive director of Stop Islamization of America, offered the same $39,000 for the Old Gray Lady to run an ad making a similar appeal to Muslims, the newspaper passed.

"This shows the hypocrisy of The New York Times, the "gold standard" in journalism, and its willingness to kowtow to violent Islamic supremacist intimidation," Geller told FoxNews.com.

Geller said her anti-Shariah ad was designed to mimic the anti-Catholic one. In calling on Muslims to quit their religion, the ad asked “Why put up with an institution that dehumanizes women and non-Muslims … [do] you keep identifying with the ideology that threatens liberty for women and menaces freedom by slaughtering, oppressing and subjugating non-Muslims… Join those of us who put humanity above the vengeful, hateful and violent teachings of Islam’s ‘prophet.’”

So Blagojevich, twice elected governor, started hustling for cash, exposing himself to prosecution. He had to figure out what he could sell to buy himself a six-figure job after he left office. I'm not excusing him. He's 100 percent guilty. But if he had played ball, he would have been protected. He wouldn't have had to sell a thing. Good fortune would have blessed him.

Smart Chicago politicians understand this, guys like Obama. I'm not accusing the president of corruption, although he and Blagojevich shared a friendship with the same influence peddler, Tony Rezko.

The young Obama played the reformer, yes, but that was only a show for an adoring media. Obama would never dare challenge the alphas of Illinois. I remember being in the editorial board room at the Tribune Tower when Obama revealed this important and always overlooked aspect of his character.

"I think I have done a good job in rising politically in this environment without being entangled in some of the traditional problems of Chicago politics," Obama told me at the onset of his presidential campaign.

"I know there are those like John Kass who would like me to decry Chicago politics more frequently, and I'll leave that to his editorial commentary," Obama said, gifting me with that jewel.

Thanks, Mr. President. My commentary?

Obama walked quietly along the Chicago Way and became president.

And Blagojevich didn't, and now he's gone.

One longtime Democratic operative admitted privately that Fluke was the least-qualified witness ever to appear before a congressional committee.

As a result of the huge commotion the Democrats' made of Fluke's "testimony," she was ridiculed the same way people in ridiculous situations often are. She was called some mean names: "slut," "prostitute," "law student" ...

In full indignation, Fluke said her critics were trying "to silence women's voices." She said this on ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and a number of other national media outlets.

Thus, Fluke became a liberal hero even braver than an actress standing up for abortion rights in front of a Bill Maher audience.

President Obama called Fluke and told her that her parents should be proud of her and to make sure she was OK. Hillary Clinton said conservatives were trying to control women. Bill Clinton called her to see if she had any plans for the weekend.

(Fluke seems to be holding up wonderfully under the nightmare of constant TV appearances. In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd think she's enjoying herself tremendously.)

I don't care what liberals believe. Just please stop telling me they're courageous for saying exactly what every non-Fox media outlet in America is dying to hear, or I'll throw up harder than Rick Santorum did when he read John F. Kennedy's speech.

Khalid al-Mansour, the Nation of Islam and Saudi Arabia Did you know that Louis Farrakhan’s attorney Percy Sutton, Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal and Anti-Semitic Black Muslim Khalid al-Mansour were instrumental in getting the future President into Harvard?

Qazi Qayyoom, an imam in Queens, says he believes the New York Police Department is keeping his community safe, and if that means some Muslims are monitored, so be it.

"The police, they come to us and say, `Is everything OK? How can we help you?" he said Monday. "They are not trying to hurt us. For this, I want to say thank you and tell them I support them."

Among the speakers was Dr. Zudhi Jasser, the narrator of "The Third Jihad," a documentary about the dangers of radical Islam that the NYPD showed in the lobby of a police training area and has since disavowed.

"We are not here to criticize the NYPD but rather thank them for monitoring extremists, a job that Muslims should be doing," Jasser said.

Jasser and others, including activist Manda Zand Ervin, said that the danger is clearly coming from within the Muslim community and that it's up to other Muslims to help law enforcement stop the threat. They said Muslims do not want to give up civil rights and are behind transparency in police work but it is wrong to suggest that all Muslims are somehow afraid of the NYPD, the nation's biggest police department.

"In no way do we want to be spied on," Jasser said. "But this is not about spying. This is about monitoring and public programs."

What Obama said:

The somewhat nuanced, word-parsing answer to that question goes something like: it might be true the president has kept all the commitments that he specifically has made to the Israelis, of which there have been very few, but the problem is that he has abandoned wholesale the assurances made by previous administrations, undermining the faith that the Israelis (to say nothing of our other allies) have in American assurances as such.

But that’s just a reason why the Israelis don’t trust Obama’s assurances in general. There’s a much more specific reason why the Israelis can’t trust Obama’s assurances on Iran, which would stipulate that the United States will attack Iran if it hardens its nuclear program past the reach of Israel’s military. And that specific reason is that those assurances quite literally don’t exist. Via Newsweek from two weeks ago, Obama refuses to provide them:

Obama is at pains to try to assert he doesn’t “bluff” when it comes to threatening the use of force, but after three years of a feckless engagement policy followed by a largely ineffective effort to impose sanctions on Iran, it’s hard to find anyone who really believes he would actually launch a strike to prevent the ayatollahs from getting their hands on a nuclear weapon. Much of what the president says in this interview is exactly what he should be stating. But his credibility is undermined by his disingenuous attempt to deny that until his re-election campaign began the keynote of his Middle East policy was to distance the United States from Israel. Equally false is his attempt to make it seem as if he doesn’t despise Israel’s prime minister.

 ...That is why a close reading of Goldberg’s attempt to help Obama to portray himself as Israel’s best friend only reinforces the phony nature of the president’s Jewish charm offensive.

Just when America believed the US government health scandal couldn’t get worse, President Obama’s handlers go one step further—increasing service members’ and veterans’ medical premiums. This move is designed to push service members and veterans to opt out of Tricare and find a new insurance provider.

President Obama’s new medical proposal seeks to save $1.8 billion from the Tricare medical system in the fiscal 2013 budget and $12.9 billion by 2017, the latter amount adding up to 0.99% of the $1.3 trillion deficit for a single year built into Obama’s proposed budget. To accomplish this spending reduction, service members should expect a 30% to 78% increase in Tricare annual premiums for the first year. In five years, service members will expect an increase ranging from 94% to 345%.

The average annual salary for a four year single enlistee is approximately $34k. If that service member were married with dependents, the salary increases to approximately $42k. Are those numbers enough to make any sane person want to enlist today, knowing they will likely ship off to some foreign land to fight a losing war like that in Afghanistan? Are those numbers enough to justify risking one’s life–enough to afford an increased medical premium that could be raised by 78% just this year or 345% by the time their initial enlistment is over?

Make no mistake; the President is downsizing our military, and this new military medical initiative is one sure way he will see volunteers leave the military knowing their benefits are jeopardized. At a time when Iran threatens the free world, Afghanistan’s violence is on a rise, and North Korea remains unstable, is now the time to play with our service members’ well-being?

So instead of caring about the needs of Marylanders and leveraging our state’s assets to create prosperity, Mr. O'Malley has treated Marylanders like guinea pigs, pushing a far-left economic agenda in hopes of impressing the liberal establishment and activists in early-primary states. Now, like many of the bailed-out Wall Street banks, Maryland is nothing more than a “zombie state” - an entity with deficits as far as the eye can see, a private sector on life support and a bloated government workforce dependent upon federal funding.When Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. left office in 2007, the state had a $1.4 billion budget surplus and nearly full employment and was a place where private-sector businesses thrived. Mr. O'Malley, after his first 18 months in office, destroyed all of those successes. He passed massive tax increases on retail sales and income. He signed the first ever “millionaire’s tax,” which forced thousands of affluent residents to flee Maryland and take their assets with them. He created the “tech tax” on information-technology companies, proposed a “fitness tax” on local gyms and has sought to index the gas tax. The poisonous combination of these tax increases has driven 2,500 Maryland businesses to close their doors and lay off more than 200,000 workers

In an American election focused on a lousy economy and high unemployment, conventional wisdom holds that foreign policy is one of Barack Obama's few strong suits. But the president is strikingly vulnerable in this area. The Republican who leads the GOP ticket can attack him on what Obama mistakenly thinks is his major strength by translating the center-right critique of his foreign policy into campaign themes and action. Here's how to beat him.

First, the Republican nominee should adopt a confident, nationalist tone emphasizing American exceptionalism, expressing pride in the United States as a force for good in the world, and advocating for an America that is once again respected (and, in some quarters, feared) as the preeminent global power. Obama acts as if he sees the United States as a flawed giant, a mistake that voters already perceive. After all, this is the president who said, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." Voters also sense he is content to manage America's decline to a status where the United States is just one country among many. As he put it, his is "a U.S. leadership that recognizes our limits."

The Republican nominee should use the president's own words and actions to portray him as naive and weak on foreign affairs. Obama's failed promises, missed opportunities, and erratic shifts suggest he is out of touch and in over his head. For example, before he was elected, he promised to meet with the leaders of Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela "without precondition." Nothing came of that except a serious blow to the image of the United States as a reliable ally. During the 2008 campaign, he also argued that Iran was a "tiny" country that didn't "pose a serious threat." How foolish that now seems.

If Obama can frame his mandate as a matter of contraceptive freedom — rather than an obvious constitutional affront on religious liberty — he may be able to successfully pit large numbers of Protestants and even many Catholics against the institutional Catholic Church.  It would be the kind of religious agitation that would make the Marxists of the last century — particularly Obama’s mentor — very proud.  How’s that for “hope” and “change”?

The president of the United States has just ordered private companies to give away for free a service that his own health and human services secretary has repeatedly called a major financial burden.

On what authority? Where does it say that the president can unilaterally order a private company to provide an allegedly free-standing service at no cost to certain select beneficiaries?

This is government by presidential fiat. In Venezuela, that’s done all the time. Perhaps we should call Obama’s “accommodation” Presidential Decree No. 1.

Consider the constitutional wreckage left by Obamacare:

.. the most important number in President Obama’s budget is that the burden of government spending will be at least $2 trillion higher in 10 years if his is enacted.

But there are also some very unsightly warts in the revenue portion of the president’s budget. Americans for Tax Reform has a good summary of the various tax hikes, most of which are based on punitive, class-warfare ideology.

“Simply put,” Frisch wrote, “the progressive movement is in need of an enemy. George W. Bush is gone. We really don’t have John McCain to kick around any more. Filling the lack of leadership on the right, Fox News has emerged as the central enemy and antagonist of the Obama administration, our Congressional majorities and the progressive movement as a whole.”

“We must take Fox News head-on in a well funded, presidential-style campaign to discredit and embarrass the network, making it illegitimate in the eyes of news consumers.”

What Frisch proceeded to suggest, however, went well beyond what legitimate presidential campaigns attempt. “We should hire private investigators to look into the personal lives of Fox News anchors, hosts, reporters, prominent contributors, senior network and corporate staff,” he wrote.

Barack Hussein Obama, it turns out, has a pattern of saying things that are untrue, delusional, arrogant, self-indulgent, absurd, silly, ludicrous, laughable and just plain wrong.

This book features a representative sampling.

Again: just try to think of anything that any other presidential nominee ever said that comes even remotely close to the vainglorious absurdity of what Barack read to us from his teleprompter that evening of June 3, 2008.

Read the words again and then really think about the thought that Barack expressed that evening. Reflect upon how he assessed this turn of events and how he believed that we and future generations ought to — and would — treasure it:

“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Who but a delusional megalomaniac could profess to believe what Obama was claiming?

“The moment” to which Barack Obama was referring was nothing more than the declaration by the news media that he had accumulated enough delegates to secure his party’s nomination.

CROWLEY: “I want to read for our viewers something that Sen. Harry Reid, the Democrat Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate, who said, ‘We do not need to bring a budget to the floor this year. It’s done, we don’t need to do it.’”

LEW: “He’s not saying that they shouldn’t pass a budget. But we also need to be honest. You can’t pass a budget in the Senate of the United States without 60 votes and you can’t get 60 votes without bipartisan support. So unless… unless Republicans are willing to work with Democrats in the Senate, Harry Reid is not going to be able to get a budget passed.”

This is patently false.

 

You can’t filibuster the budget. The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 stipulates that debate is automatically cut off after 50 hours of debate. At that point, a budget can be passed by a simple majority, 51 votes. Democrats currently hold 53 seats in the Senate. They can pass a budget on a simple party-line vote.

Lew, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget, surely knows this. While the Obama Administration has regularly plumbed the depths of managerial incompetence, even they can’t be this incompetent.

That Lew prefaced this whopper with the tell-tale “let’s be honest” canard only highlights the cynical political maneuvering that is at the heart of the Administration.

So, let’s really be honest here. The latest Obama budget contains what virtually every proposed Democrat budget has for the past few decades; tax hikes, increased spending now and illusory budget “savings” some time in the ill-defined future. The Senate could pass Obama’s proposed budget within a couple weeks. The White House’s real problem is that Democrats don’t want to vote on his proposed budget.

Before the political press and partisans focused on speeches at the Conservative Political Action Conference, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) gave a speech to an American Israel Public Affairs Committee gathering in New York earlier in the week. He hasn’t often ventured into foreign policy, but since he is both a surrogate for Mitt Romney and someone who surely must be on the short list for vice president, his views should be carefully examined.

A typical Christie zinger got the most attention: “I admire Israel for the enemies it has made.” But in fact his speech was more than a series of one-liners.

Most important, he came down unequivocally on the side of an internationalist, forward-leaning foreign policy:

We can’t pull up the drawbridge that connects America to the rest of the world. That simply doesn’t work. And as we learned to our horror a decade ago, we as a country and a people are vulnerable to terrorists armed with box cutters, bombs, and viruses, be they computer generated or man-made.

Out of the rubble and the ruins, and out of the destruction, we were reminded that evil men guided by an evil ideology can do great harm to us; that no nation, no state, and no city is beyond their reach. And so we need to remain vigilant together and be prepared to act together with our friends and allies to discourage, deter and defend against aggressors all across the world against our nation and Israel.

Now Christie, never one to shy from some colorful illusions, translated that idea this way: “And this is a different fact of life that I was taught by my Sicilian mother in New Jersey, but applies just as much to Israel and the United States in this dangerous world we live in. Weakness invites aggression. And individuals, and nations, need to have the backs of our friends without compromise, and without exception.”

He also made the case that he really is no novice when it comes to national security. He said he gets his understanding “ not from my time in Trenton — it’s from my time as United States attorney for New Jersey, the first United States attorney in the post -9/11 era.”

He cited two formative cases during his time as U.S. attorney. The first was the abduction and murder of Daniel Pearl: “Because the e-mail that his captors sent to lure him to the site of the kidnapping went through the Dow Jones server in South Brunswick, N.J., I now came face to face, in my first two weeks as U.S. attorney, with the responsibility of trying to save Danny Pearl’s life and to capture his adductors. Unfortunately, even though we moved as quickly as we could, we could not move fast enough to avert tragedy.”

The second was the Fort Dix terrorist plot. “The Mount Laurel Police Department called the FBI, along with my office; we began a year’s-long surveillance which led to the uncovering of a plot to kill American servicemen and women at Fort Dix, New Jersey. The Fort Dix six were ultimately arrested, indicted and convicted by our office for the plot to kill American soldiers on American soil. They were sent to prison for life, and they sit there tonight.”

He told the AIPAC audience how these experiences informed his thinking. Most important: “America should stand by its friends and its democratic allies, even, and sometimes especially, when it’s unpopular to do so. And you know I know, that it may not be fashionable in some of the chancelleries, the foreign ministries and salons around the world to talk about why America stands with Israel — but that’s no excuse not to be saying, and saying it loudly.”

Next, he made the case that Israel and the United States are bound together by common values and are threatened by the same enemies.

Israel’s enemies hate her for the same reason they hate America. There’s a reason that America is referred to as the “Great Satan” and Israel is referred to as “Little Satan.”

We both believe in self-government, we both believe in democracy and unalienable rights.

From what I understand, the Knesset and Israel’s free, vibrant news media make Trenton seems like a cordial and sleepy atmosphere. You’ll find that hard to believe, if I say so myself.

Americans and Israelis both believe in free enterprise, accountability, in transparency, and in rewarding excellence.

We both believe in the rule of law and limits on the power of the state. We both believe in peace through strength. . . .

Since September 2000, 1,218 Israeli civilians have been killed in terror attacks. That would be the equivalent of over 48,000 Americans murdered by terrorists in the same period.

And then he turned to Iran.Unlike President Obama, who often characterizes Iran’s nuclear-weapons program as a threat aimed at Israel, Christie asserted that “stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capability must be a top priority of the United States of America. Any president, Republican or Democrat, who allows such a thing to occur on his watch, would be acting in a way that is profoundly against the national security interests of the United States and the security interests of our friends in Israel.”

Throughout the speech he had a very Christie-like refrain: Don’t mince words. He urged U.S. policy makers to “[t]ell them the truth about the difficulty of the solutions. Treat them like adults rather than children, not like other politicians. “ He urged that “we tell some simple truths to our friends and our adversaries around the world.” And he declared: “ [W]e need to speak that truth out loud. It makes us uncomfortable. It is a difficult set of words to string together, but we know that ignoring it will not make it go away, any more than ignoring our problems at home will make them go away either. America needs no introduction, but it is time that we start to live up to our greatness again. By telling the truth to each other and being willing to listen to those hard truths. There is simply nothing more important if America wants to continue to lead a free and hopeful world.”

That insistence that we distinguish friend from foe, act strongly in favor of U.S. interests and eschew namby-pamby diplomatic talk tell us a lot about his world view. And it suggests that conservative hawks should be very glad (in addition to agreement his domestic views and admiration for his record of accomplishments governor) to see him on the presidential ticket.

Chalk up yet another religious controversy on President Obama’s record.

The furor over contraception that consumed much of this week is just one more instance of the president having been put onto the back foot at the intersection of faith and politics.

 

It’s a problem that previously has popped up in controversies over Israel, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and even Obama’s 2008 comments about people holding on to “guns and religion.”

It’s extraordinarily difficult to be surprised by the mainstream media’s flagrant obeisance to Barack Obama—Jeremiah Wright seems like a decade ago—but I shook my head in disgust earlier this week after the President made an especially arrogant remark during an interview with Today’s Matt Lauer. Obama said, “I deserve a second term but we’re not done.” Apparently the Campaigner-in-Chief is, unlike Mitt Romney or Joe Biden or Newt Gingrich—men who provide a bundle of mirth and derision for political reporters and pundits—constitutionally unable to leave a verbal mess on the floor.

Think about what Obama said: “I deserve a second term.” Americans can, and will, decide whether or not that’s true, but the President’s sense of entitlement certainly rivals that what Romney is accused of every day. Had Obama, mindful of political manners, said, “I believe I’ve earned a second term, but, you know, Matt, that’s a decision voters will make in November,” no one could complain. But “deserve”? Shucks, I could tell family and colleagues that I “deserve” a best-selling book, say, or better eyesight, a Lotto jackpot or a map leading me to the Fountain of Youth. Such brio would be met by laughter, or scorn, and it’d be, well, deserved.

It goes without saying that had George W. Bush told a TV interviewer in 2004 he “deserved a second term” the liberal media would’ve run with that bit for months. Slate’s Jacob Weisberg, who collected “Bushisms” for several books, might feign outrage and then like a squirrel collecting “wingnuts,” happily point out Bush’s goof to his readers.

During his walk-around, it appears that Obama was particularly enamored by a pair of muscle cars: A Chevrolet Camaro with an American flag and Bald Eagle mural and the other a 2013 Ford Shelby GT500 in Grabber Blue. Depending on which transcript you follow, some believe Obama suggested that the Shelby was “sick,” while David Shepardson from The Detroit News says on second thought the President might have said “this is a stick.”

Either way, Obama seemed quite taken aback by the 650 horsepower ponycar, joking while cracking a smile, “This is what I needed in high school.”

The Washington Post is reporting that Barack Obama, whose campaign touted him as a great unifier, is the most polarizing president ever. Comparing Obama's approval/disapproval ratings, the Post's Chris Cilliza, finds that in his third year in office, Obama's unfavorable numbers are higher even than those of George W. Bush. The numbers should come as no surprise. What does amaze is the Post taking note of them. What would have been truly shocking would have been the Post putting the Bush/Obama comparisons in the proper context by noting that a significant amount of Bush's disapproval was driven by a relentless onslaught of critical, unfavorable even disparaging reporting by the liberal media. Today we witness that same liberal media bending itself into pretzels trying to make Obama's incompetence and failures look like anything but.

Can you imagine what Obama's true disapproval rating would be if he didn't have those media alchemists trying to turn his leaden administration into gold?

The State of the Union could have been written by a computer program. All the now familiar Obama furniture was in the room: the mock outrage at “them,” the psychodramatic first-person boasting (as in, “I will oppose..,” “I will not work with…,” “I will decline…,” “I will not stand by …,” I will not cede…,” “I will not walk away…,” “I will not back down…,” “I will not go back…”); the now customary rear-view-mirror jab at his fading predecessor; the monotonous promising that something is so bad that we must have a new program for it (each year the same threat, the same solution, the same failure); and the silence about the Obama legacy of stimulus, debt, and ObamaCare.

But the people are tired and simply by now shut their ears. Here are five things in the current age that exhaust us.

Turns out he was one of those people. He spent the next two years building cred with the left by filibustering judges whom he admitted were qualified and voting present on Senate resolutions to chastise MoveOn.org for smearing his future CIA director. He declared his candidacy in early 2007, spent a year and a half running for president, and then studiously ignored his campaign promises to tackle the greatest fiscal challenge of our age because it would have been too darned risky for his reelection bid. Instead he pushed cheap, inconsequential budget gimmicks to set up a class-warfare campaign this year against the GOP and unconstitutional recess appointments in hopes of baiting the “do-nothing Congress” he wants to run against into being even more confrontational. (He spends several paragraphs of the speech you’re about to watch whining about Mike Lee’s vow to block all of his nominees in protest of the illegal Cordray appointment.) It’s all electoral maneuvering. It’s all about the campaign. Always.

In a front-page story on Tuesday discussing the documentary film, "The Third Jihad," and its use by the NYPD in training, The New York Times once again collaborates with radical Islamists to help shape the news. The article revealed the newspaper's bias, from the vaguely threatening headline – "In Police Training, a Dark Film on U.S. Muslims" - and by relying on those who are not simply opposed to the film, but have previously demonstrated their support of radical Islamists by both word and by association with similarly aligned groups.
 
The Times' article, written by Michael Powell, primarily relies on the opinions of Zead Ramadan of the Council on American-Islamic Relations' New York chapter (CAIR-NY) and Faiza Patel of the Brennan Center, both of whom aver that the NYPD acted questionably by showing city police the film, to present the case. Ramadan asserts that the movie "defiled our faith and misrepresented everything we stood for." Patel stated that, "The police have shown an explosive documentary to its officers and simply stonewalled us."
 
The problem with Ramadan and Patel, left unsaid by the newspaper, is found in their words and associations. As has been its longstanding policy, the Times never mentions that CAIR is a Hamas support group, created by the Muslim Brotherhood to present and promote its interests. (Of course, even if one day the Times did acknowledge that, it would still have to break another self-imposed taboo of having never once called Hamas a terrorist organization.)
 
In contrast to the newspaper, the film does reveal how CAIR was created shortly after a secret 1993 meeting in Philadelphia involving members of the Muslim Brotherhood's Palestine Committee. The goal was for CAIR to operate as a pro-Hamas lobbying group, without being publicly linked to Hamas.
 
The FBI later cited that evidence, which was used to help name CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation conspiracy trial, in explaining why it cut off formal communication with CAIR. "Until we can resolve whether there continues to be a connection between CAIR or its executives and HAMAS," FBI Assistant Director Richard Powers wrote in April 2009, "the FBI does not view CAIR as an appropriate liaison partner."

 

Seems like a straightforward, respectful letter:

Welcome to Arizona!

You‘ve arrived in a state at the forefront of America’s recovery — and her future. We were at the brink. We were at the bottom of the list in job creation. Today, we have a balanced budget and we’re in the top 10 for job creation.

I’m proud of that hard-won recovery — the result of many tough decisions, courage and perseverance.

My hope is while you are here you will have a chance to see our tremendous results first hand.

We both love the great country, but we fundamentally disagree on how to best make America grow and prosper once again. I‘d love an opportunity to share with you how we’ve been able to turn Arizona around with hard choices that turned out to be the right ones.

And, of course, my offer to visit the border — and buy lunch — still stands!

With respect,
Jan

As the president launches his re-election bid by striking a more centrist tone, the partisan press is helping him whitewash his radical past. Teamwork or not, it'll be hard to bleach.

Exhibit A is CNN's Soledad O'Brien. Earlier this week, she hosted a segment that tried to de-link Obama from Chicago socialist Saul Alinsky. The late Alinsky is the father of community organizing and the author of the far-left bible "Rules for Radicals."

O'Brien opened her piece by scolding GOP front-runner Newt Gingrich for warning Obama "will represent Saul Alinsky (and) European socialism" in a second term. "President Obama has never said that he was influenced by Alinsky," O'Brien insisted.

Of course he hasn't. He's not stupid enough to publicly link himself to a socialist. But the record is clear that he was in fact influenced by Alinsky, if only CNN's "journalists" would do their homework. Allow us to do it for them:

• Obama first learned Alinsky's rules in the 1980s, when Alinskyite radicals with the Chicago-based Alinsky group Gamaliel Foundation recruited, hired, trained and paid him as a community organizer in South Side Chicago. (Gamaliel's website expressly states it grew out of the Alinsky movement.)

• In 1988, Obama even wrote a chapter for the book "After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois," in which he lamented organizers' "lack of power" in implementing change.

• Gamaliel board member John McKnight, a hard-core student of Alinsky, penned a letter for Obama to help him get into Harvard Law School.

• Obama took a break from his Harvard studies to travel to Los Angeles for eight days of intense training at Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation, a station of the cross for acolytes.

• In turn, he trained other community organizers in Alinsky agitation tactics.

• Obama also taught Alinsky's "Power Analysis" methods at the University of Chicago.

• During the presidential campaign, Obama hired one of his Gamaliel mentors, Mike Kruglik, to train young campaign workers in Alinsky tactics at "Camp Obama," a school set up at Obama headquarters in Chicago. The tactics helped Obama capture the youth vote like no other president before him.

• Power would no longer be an issue, as Obama infiltrated the highest echelon of the political establishment — the White House — fulfilling Alinsky's vision of a new "vanguard" of coat-and-tie radicals who "work inside the system" to change the system.

• After the election, his other Gamaliel mentor, Jerry Kellman (who hired him and whose identity Obama disguised in his memoir), helped the Obama administration establish Organizing for America, which mobilizes young supporters to agitate for Obama's legislative agenda using "Rules for Radicals."

From Frank Gaffney on Obama's SOTU speech:

Some have described such remarks as delusional.  They are worse.  They are designed to delude us.

Ditto one of the President’s bigger applause lines:  “Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn't know what they're talking about.”  No objective analysis – of our contracting military presence around the world, of our retreat from leadership on the ground and in space, of our military now in the process of being hollowed out, of the condition of our fraying alliances or the emboldening of our increasingly assertive enemies – would support his contention.

To the contrary, the facts indicate that, under his post-American policies, the “fundamental transformation of America” that he promised on the eve of his election has moved forward inexorably: our transformation from an unrivaled superpower, to a nation that no longer is a reliable ally and no longer a feared adversary.

It doesn’t have to be that way – and we dare not let it continue in this fashion.  But the first step towards turning around a perilous trend is to recognize what is happening.  And speeches that are not simply pollyannish, but fraudulent, will not do that.  To the contrary, they are certain to have the effect of making such a turn-around unlikely until it is still harder, if not as a practical matter impossible, to effect.

Unfortunately, given the nature of the man delivering such a skewed portrayal of the State of the Union, we can only conclude that his remarks were calculated to have that effect – a prime example of his audacity of deceit.

Roger Cohen’s January 16th column in The New York Times, “Don’t Do It, Bibi” is only the latest in the Obama election campaign’s efforts to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to take a serious risk at Israel’s being nuked by a nuclear Iran rather than cause any ripples in President Obama campaign for re-election to a second term.

Mr. Cohen begins his rant by quoting the purported advice of an unnamed American ambassador in Europe declaring Mr. Netanyahu to be an ingrate for all that the Obama administration has done for Israel, and strongly suggests the Israeli Prime Minister should “above all stay out of our election-year politics.”

According to Mr. Cohen, President Obama’s is justifiably furious with the Mr. Netanyahu because he had the audacity to “go over his head” by speaking “to a Republican-dominated Congress” even though it was Congress that invited him; again “ingratitude for solid U.S. support”, including in the UN; and the Netanyahu government’s refusal to declare a second freeze on building houses for Jews over the 1949 armistice lines “for the sake of peace negotiations” even though the first unprecedented freeze failed to bring the Palestinians back to the negotiations table. But for Mr. Cohen, Obama can do no wrong, and Netanyahu can do no right.

Should anyone think the existential threat to Israel is more serious than Mr. Obama’s re-election next November, Roger Cohen disabuses of this notion. “I would add a further piece of advice to Netanyahu if he cares about his dysfunctional relationship with Obama — and he should because Israelis know the United States matters…,” opines Mr. Cohen. “That advice is: Do not attack Iran this spring or summer.”

Mr. Cohen writes of Netanyahu’s chutzpah for considering bombing Iran, and this “despite a call from Obama last Thursday and messages from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.”

It won’t decide the 2012 election, but the meltdown of Barack Obama’s Islamophile foreign policy has to hurt. Iran’s imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons humiliates a president so committed to dialogue with the evil lunatics in Tehran that he refused to support a mass outpouring of democracy demonstrators during the summer of 2009. Obama’s closest foreign policy friendship is with the Islamist president of Turkey, who has jailed more journalists than China and steered his country towards imminent economic disaster. Tayyip Erdogan may not be a terrorist, as Rick Perry said in last week’s debate, but he backs them, including Hamas.

And then there is Egypt: Even the New York Times has noticed that Egypt’s economy is collapsing, and that the country faces disaster as it runs out of money.

In 2005, Michael Savage famously wrote a book titled, Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, the subject of which is self-explanatory.  And more recently, Dr. Lyle Rossiter, a board-certified clinical psychologist, wrote a book in which he diagnosed the ideology of the left as a tangible mental illness.  Perhaps though, liberalism is not so much a novel mental disorder, but a more cleverly disguised form of illness already widely studied since the late ‘60s – narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

The Mayo Clinic defines NPD as “a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance and a deep need for admiration.”  This seems in tune with the fact that liberals, along with their degenerate offspring, the Occupy Wall Street movement, believe their policies and platforms fall in the majority - or the 99% if you will - despite being outnumbered by conservatives at a 2-1 clip. 

There are other symptoms that define NPD and the left alike…

Expecting constant praise and admiration

This is a staple of the Occupy movement and their constant ‘look at me’ media whoring.  The need to feed their pride consumes them, fueling a self-importance that must continue to grow through perpetual media coverage.

Being jealous of others

The very premise on which the Occupy movement and the liberal platform of wealth redistribution are based is jealousy. They want what others have, and they want it without cost to themselves, either monetarily or based on time. They are envious of those with wealth, health insurance, homes, etc. It is a common attribute upon which all liberal protesters rally around.

Expecting others to go along with your ideas and plans

Is there anything that personified this more than the Obamacare fight?  The measure was opposed by likely voters by a wide margin, 54-41 percent.  Yet it was still rammed down the collective throats of the American people.  Why?  Because liberals honestly thought that once the plebeians had a chance to see their ideas, they would go along with it.  Proof of this materialized when Nancy Pelosi uttered these famous words:  “… We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

Setting unrealistic goals

Those crazy kids over at the OWS website, at one point gave us a list of humorous demands that included these deep-seated liberal fantasies.

• Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment
• Free college education
• Open borders migration
• Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all

The liberal politician’s equivalent of this list would be:

• Extending unemployment benefits ad nauseam
• Student loan forgiveness
•  Illegal immigration amnesty (DREAM Act)
•  Postponement of foreclosures

All currently under consideration by the Obama administration.

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/rusty-weiss/2012/01/22/yes-liberalism-mental-disorder#ixzz1kIOYCAnf

Nobody in the elite media wants to cover it. Nobody's ever gone back and looked at what Saul Alinsky stands for. Nobody ever asks what neighborhood organizer meant. He wasn't organizing Boys and Girls Clubs. He was teaching political radicalism. It explains his entire administration. He is who he is. It's--you know, it's not that he's a bad human being, my impression is that he has a good family, that he really loves his children and his wife, that he's a very pleasant person in some ways. But the objective fact is he believes in a very radical vision of America's future that is fundamentally different from probably 80 percent of this country. And nobody in the elite media has ever wanted to dig into it, ever wanted--why would he veto the Keystone pipeline? Why would he kill jobs in America? Why would he have a National Labor Relations Board attack Boeing? Because it fits the model of Alinsky radicalism.

In reality, if the media had fully reported Obama's ties to Alinsky and other left-wing radicals in 2008, he never would have beaten Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The question now is whether this year's Republican presidential nominee will do a better job of forcing the press to report it this election cycle.

Stay tuned.

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2012/01/22/newt-gingrich-tells-david-gregory-nobody-elite-media-wants-cover-obam#ixzz1kIIYUxlU

When President Obama has a bad day, or more specifically, on days when the economic news has been bad, I get a slew of feedback from conservative readers that go like this:

“See, you liberal media nincompoops, this is all your fault, you treated Obama like a saint when he was running in 2007 and 2008 and you didn’t vet him, investigate him, report on him skeptically. You were so fawning (and adoring of his blackness), you missed that he was a (pick your adjective), radical, socialist, Muslim, inexperienced, dangerous, corrupt, weak Chicago politician with no track record of accomplishment, whose only talent is giving speeches.”

Those e-mails usually employ much harsher language, and some are filled with expletives.

If you watched the Republican debate Thursday night, you heard a muted version of this criticism of Obama from Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. (Although Ron Paul almost never mentioned Obama, he criticized the entire system of government instead.)

Deborah Howell, Post ombudsman from 2005 through 2008, said at the end of her tenure that “some of the conservatives’ complaints about a liberal tilt [at The Post] are valid.”

I won’t quibble with her conclusion. I think she was right. I read all of The Post’s lengthier, meatier stories on Obama published from October 2006 through Election Day 2008. That was about 120 stories, and tens of thousands of words, including David Maraniss’s 10,000-word profile about Obama’s Hawaii years, which I liked.

I think there was way too little coverage of his record in the Illinois Senate and U.S. Senate, for example, with one or two notably good exceptions. But there were hard-hitting stories too, even a very tough one on Michelle Obama’s job at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

And that’s what The Post needs to do in covering his reelection campaign this year: be hard-hitting on his record and provide fresh insight and plenty of context to put the past three rough years into perspective.

More than anything else, Obama campaigned and was elected on the promise of change, of changing politics to something less partisan so that Washington would work better. Did he do that? How hard did he try to work with Republicans? How hard did Republicans try to work with him?

How are his, and Congress’s, choices on the financial crisis and bailouts looking now, three years later? Were banks regulated too much or not enough? Was enough done to ease the mortgage and foreclosure problems? What do nonpartisan economists say about this record?

Obama campaigned on health-care reform, and he got a massive bill passed, most of which will not go into effect until 2013 and beyond. How do experts look at it as implementation gets closer — its potential costs and its benefits?

Obama also campaigned on green technologies, and he used the stimulus bill to tilt government spending toward those objectives. How effective has it been, beyond the Solyndra fiasco? Can we get a better handle on how effective the stimulus bill was, or wasn’t, in creating jobs or keeping economic activity from bottoming out?

In foreign policy, Obama campaigned on getting the Middle East peace process moving again. It hasn’t happened. Why not? Is it his fault, or are changes within Israel and the Middle East more broadly to blame? Has Iran’s drive for nuclear technologies been blunted at all?

Obama campaigned on ending the Iraq war, and he did. He campaigned on doing more in Afghanistan; he did that. He got Osama bin Laden. Under Obama, drones may have killed more Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists than anything George W. Bush did in eight years of office. But has that stopped terrorism? Has it worsened relations with Pakistan? Has it worked?

Has the image of the United States abroad gotten, as Obama promised, better than it was under Bush? Has Obama’s reaction to the Arab Spring in 2011 been right, including the limited intervention in Libya and the non-intervention in Syria?

How well or badly have his Cabinet secretaries run the government? Has his Race to the Top education initiative worked?

Some of this has been looked at already in Post coverage. But collecting it in one place on the Web would be helpful, as well as looking deeper, now with more hindsight and evidence, at Obama’s record.

Patrick B. Pexton can be reached at 202-334-7582 or at ombudsman@washpost.com. For updates, read the omblog at www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/omblog.

With America's future at stake in November, I decided to support Mitt Romney for three reasons: his Reaganaut philosophy, executive experience and general-election campaign strengths.

Our country's political focus on economic recovery has allowed President Obama to escape responsibility for his failures in the area of national security. Mr. Obama clearly doesn't recognize that lasting prosperity is impossible without robust foreign and defense policies and capabilities—and, conversely, that the requisite political, military and intelligence resources are not sustainable without a strong economy. Today's textbook example: the president's rejection of the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada.

Last year, the Obama administration co-sponsored with Egypt a U.N. Human Rights Council resolution against “racial and religious stereotyping,” which offered cover to the Islamists in their drive to put any criticism of their religion off limits.

The leading countries in the OIC are among the least religiously tolerant in the world. In most cases, Christians, Jews, Hindus and others may not freely practice their faith, and under Koranic law, converts from Islam face the death penalty. The OIC has stated that any freedoms in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that conflict with Shariah do not apply to its members. If this is the type of cooperation the Obama administration is seeking to promote with Islam, then the “final hour” draws closer still. Mr. Obama said Jesus Christ died for his sins, but the United States continues to suffer for the president’s mistakes.

There is growing consternation in Republican circles and among conservatives over why Republicans keep allowing the various Communist, leftist and otherwise anti-American TV networks to host GOP debates.

The ickiness of Diana Sawyer asking questions in her cloying voice is more than most can bear. The utter cluelessness of the questions these people think actual American voters care about is mystifying. The shameless and ham-handed pandering to conservatives by the networks is revolting.

Indeed, the entire phoenix rising candidacy of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich can be attributed to America’s abject hatred of the left-wing media. He was destitute and written off by the press when he tapped into one of the most visceral political reactions coursing through the veins of regular Americans. And once be began beating up the media, America gathered around him.

Last night, we saw once again why Republicans need to keep allowing fakers and Communists to moderate their GOP debates. Because without the leftist, elitist snobs to beat the ever-living crap out of every couple of weeks, the debates would be so much less fun.

Now I realize that what we watched last night was not a simple beating and perhaps it was wrong of so many of us to enjoy it with such bloodlust. It was more a public evisceration. A man’s entrails were picked out and drawn far out from inside him and left for jackals to chew on before his living eyes.

Facebook may give Barack Obama a slight edge this coming presidential election while creating a wide misperception about who’s actually pulling ahead in the Republican Party. A new partnership between Facebook and Politico announced last week will reveal users private messages if and when they relate to their feelings about a political candidate.

Liz Gannes of All Things D enlightens us about the new dual effort, reporting that:

It will consist of sentiment analysis reports and voting-age user surveys, accompanied by stories by Politico reporters. Most notably, the Facebook-Politico data set will include Facebook users’ private status messages and comments. While that may alarm some people, Facebook and Politico say the entire process is automated and no Facebook employees read the posts.

Rather, every post and comment — both public and private — by a U.S. user that mentions a presidential candidate’s name will be fed through a sentiment analysis tool that spits out anonymized measures of the general U.S. Facebook population.

Apparently, the fact that “no Facebook employees read the posts,” is supposed to assure us that the quotes are not being hand picked to prefer one candidate over another. After all, since the posts will be published worldwide it can’t possibly be referring to privacy (plus, the quotes are “anonymized” so they can’t be attributed to any particular Facebook user).

But here’s the thing.

Whether or not the quotes are actually being hand picked or being “fed through a sentiment analysis tool” (whatever that means) isn’t really that relevant because we all know that more young people than old use Facebook. That means that in all likelihood those candidates that appeal to younger voters (namely Barack Obama–surprise, surprise, Mark Zuckerberg’s apparent favorite will be getting lots of play on the pages of Politico as the national favorite.

White House press secretary Jay Carney is asked why President Obama hasn't released his college transcripts. Carney dodges the question and tells the reporter, Ed Henry of FOX News, to ask the campaign.

Carney then talks about candidates and releasing their tax returns.

Ed Henry, FOX News: "I don't know how many years, maybe you do, George Romney released of his college transcripts, but Republicans like to complain that the President has not released his college transcripts. What is the stated reason for that?"

Jay Carney, White House: "I would refer you to the campaign.

"I think we've answered this a bunch. The tradition of releasing income tax records for serious potential nominees, and nominees of the two parties is well established. It's not a law. But it's well established. It's one this President abided by when he was a Senator. It's one numerous Republicans and Democrats have abided by and we think its a good idea."

Still, Obama’s two greatest failures may be his failure to grasp the significance and timeliness of the pro-democracy movement sweeping through much of the Middle East, as well as his complete mishandling of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.

True, by mostly following in Bush’s footsteps when it comes to the War on Terror, Obama may have helped himself by silencing some critics on the right. But that’s hardly the thing his Democrat base gets all worked up about. On almost every count of the sweeping foreign policy vision Obama laid out when he was elected, there’s no other conclusion to be drawn than that Obama has been a dismal flop, often looking more naive than statesmanlike in the eyes of the world as a whole. And that, according to the Washington Post.

President Barack Obama's view of the Muslim Brotherhood is based on his -- and his advisors' -- apparent rationale that the Islamist group is reformed and much more like the American and European models of pluralistic societies.

However, experts on Islam and terrorism claim that the Muslim Brotherhood’s -- and the radical Salafists -- dominance of the Egyptian government, by virtue of its recent parliamentary election victories, will eventually lead to the imposition of Sharia law on Islamic Arabs and jihad against infidels.

Only in the area of foreign affairs was there a substantive policy difference and in that area one candidate — Ron Paul — stood out. He was the sole isolationist (or even relative isolationist) on the stage. Every other candidate was considerably firmer than the incumbent president in his or her support for a strong American defense, not to mention for a steadfast opposition to a nuclear Iran. Paul was by himself on the opposite side, further to the left on national defense than Barack Obama.

So it was Ron Paul’s foreign policy views that were repudiated by Iowa Republicans on Tuesday.

And they were roundly repudiated — 79 to 21 by the vote percentages.

Paul was defeated by Rick Santorum, a foreign policy hawk who called Paul’s views “disgusting,” and by Mitt Romney, whose opinions are similar to Santorum’s (as were all the other candidates’ in the Iowa caucus).

Paul sought to place a positive spin on his third place finish in a “victory” speech, but it rang hollow as his son, Senator Rand Paul, standing behind him, conspicuously stopped applauding when his father’s words turned to foreign policy. The Senator had the look of someone who wished he were someplace else.

First lady Michelle Obama’s separate voyage to Hawaii promises to cost taxpayers tens of thousand in extra dollars, as her separate entourage and hefty flying costs pile on the costs.

The flight alone is priced at more than $60,000, according to government estimates. But that’s only the beginning. The additional cargo flight that often accompanies the first lady on such a trip must also be paid for, as well as the limos and other accoutrements it will contain.

Rush Limbaugh let it rip at Barack Obama‘s policies and gave a scathing assessment of the President’s view of America in this interview Wednesday night with Greta Van Susteren.

Rush said that “Obama is his policies, obama is the problem, obama has a vision for this country that is not held by anywhere near a majority of the american people.”

In Rush’s analysis, if Obama had campaigned on what he has done during his time in office, he would have gotten around 30% of the national vote.

Of course, Limbaugh singled out Obamacare for particular criticism, which he called “dangerous and destructive.”

If Obama wins reelection, Rush believes “the country is going to change forever”and there will be a “massive loss of individual liberty and freedom… national single payer healthcare is where this is headed.”

Rush also said that “Obama has a chip on his shoulder about the country… thinks of it as criminal, guilty in many ways…its superpower status the result of theft.”

On the public perception of President Obama, Rush rejected many of the prevailing sentiments of the mainstream media. He said we have been “living under a number of assumptions about obama– one of them is that he is brilliant, he is messianic”– and both of those, in Limbaugh’s opinion, are false.

As for the way ahead in 2012, Rush has very ominous predictions of a highly negative and divisive Obama campaign. “All obama can do is run a negative campaign,“ Rush said ”tear apart his opponent and country.”

But there was some light at the end of the tunnel. Perhaps most importantly given that the GOP primary season is about to kick off, Rush weighed in on the field of candidates and said: “I Don’t believe… Republicans only have one person who can beat him.”

So you're watching a soccer game in Dearborn, Michigan between Al-Tadamun and Chelsea, a game that was advertised in public leaflets and on the Arab American website; it was dedicated to something termed, “The Day of Jerusalem.” The thought of incorporating such a slogan into promotional material about a sporting event puzzles you. What is this “Day of Jerusalem” all about? Later, you discover that the game was hosted by Husham Alhusayni – the main spiritual leader of the Karbala Center in Dearborn – who was thanked by Samir Al-Jabiri and Muhammad Alhasayni who said the victory was “dedicated to honor the souls of the martyrs of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa...”

 These are clearly terrorists who murder civilians; such a dedication should spawn outrage but it did not.

 The sound of silence in response to such a thing echoed throughout Dearborn's Muslim community. Why did no one object to such hatred, religious bigotry and open support for terrorism?

 Husham Alhusayni is not just the imam at Dearborn's Karbala Center; he is also featured in All American Muslim, which airs on The Learning Channel (TLC). In the program, Alhusayni is seen presiding over marriages within Muslim families in Dearborn, whose day-to-day lives are portrayed as they interact in English.

When Sean Hannity attempted to extract a confession from Alhusayni, the double speaking slick-Willy, Alhusayni, repeatedly refused to denounce Hezbollah. Americans were left to wonder if he had decided to plead the fifth, which involves no incrimination. Conversely, when people like Alhusayni have their Arabic translated into English, those same Americans are struck with both shock and awe. Open declarations of public support for Hezbollah to millions is given but is done so in Arabic, of course.

 Alhusayni is a signatory to the Jerusalem Document of 2009, which reads more like Mein Kampf. It refers to the war on Zionism as a war between “good and evil.” Zionism is considered an “aggression” that is infecting “the entire human race.” Muslims are told to “get ready for the holy Jihad.” 

If one is inclined to believe this is the “struggle within” version of Jihad, the reading of the following phrase after translation should prompt a re-evaluation:

 “We remind our sons to get ready to carry out their duty in Holy Jihad and continue the path which our young valiant men in Hezbollah began in Southern Lebanon.”

This message was not given to Muslims in Lebanon but is “essential for the Iraqi community living in the Diaspora,” which includes Dearborn. Several of the top Muslim leaders in the US endorsed this document, like Fadel Al-Sahlani, the official representative of Iraq’s leading Shia religious authority and Muhammad Zaki al-Souajh who was the leading imam of the Muslim community in Houston, Texas for several years, as well as Murtada Qazwini.

It is not just about the dog which the Catholic convert to Islam in All American Muslim had to get rid of because his new Muslim family could not tolerate dogs, which are considered unclean in the Islamic culture; the document also refers to completely ridding the world of Zionism:

“The struggle between good and evil is not measured by a generation. It does not circulate on a specific land. Jerusalem is an Islamic destiny that stems from ancient history into the future indebted to 1/5 of humanity. What it suffers from Zionist aggression does not only encompass the Palestinian borders but the entire human race. It is time for the nations concerned which have influence, that is the US and all its allies, to reconsider their position regarding Zionist aggression.”

The cancer of Zionism does not only concentrate on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict but is considered an infection within “the entire human race.”

By Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-Calif.) - 

After observing President Obama for the last three years, it has become obvious to me that the president might prefer to be a university professor rather than do the job he holds today. While he might not realize that he feels this way, the evidence is very clear to those who work with or watch him closely. 

Let me be clear — I’m not trying to disparage professors. But anyone who wonders why the president is not crushing the weak Republican field only needs to examine how President Obama has behaved more like Professor Obama:

Barack Obama’s speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, has certainly made waves. Well-received by the mainstream media, The Baltimore Sun wrote that the President has finally found “his voice” while the ever-dour Bill Press said that Obama was “channeling Teddy Roosevelt.” Yet if talk-show host Rush Limbaugh is correct, the President was channeling someone also long-dead but a lot more red. The radio giant asserts that Obama has “outed” himself, in that he has “announced to the world in no uncertain terms that he is a socialist, if not a Marxist.”

What did Obama say that brought cheers from the Left and jeers from the Right? Among other things, he stated that our relatively free enterprise system not only “doesn’t work” — “it has never worked.”

The first thing to note is the blindness and ingratitude evidenced by this statement. Our nation enjoys wealth unprecedented in man’s history, with its supermarkets stocked with thousands of products from the world over; and with how its “poor” people usually have cars, TVs, cellphones and other luxuries, as well as bellies that come out and greet you. So while “never worked” may describe Obama’s constituents, it can hardly be said about our system.

So our system shouldn’t be on trial here — Obama should be. But is it really fair to suggest he may be a Marxist? Or was there evidence for it all along?

Well, consider the words of John Drew, a man whom writer Paul Kengor calls “Obama’s Missing Link.” A contemporary of Obama’s at Occidental College three decades ago, Drew says that he himself was a Marxist at the time — and part of Obama’s inner circle. And what does he reveal?

Obama was an “ardent” “Marxist-Leninist” who “was in 100 percent, total agreement with [his] Marxist professors,” said Drew.

In fact, Drew states that while he was a more nuanced Marxist who tried to convince Obama that old-style communist revolution was unrealistic in the West, the future President would have none of it and considered Drew a “reactionary.”

Drew doesn’t believe the President has changed, either, and I agree. I explained why in a follow-up to Kengor’s piece, writing:

Some may say that a person can change markedly over a 30-year period. This is true. 

…Yet a transition from flat-out "Marxist-Leninist" to someone who rejects the red menace is a pretty big change, don't you think? In fact, wouldn't such a personal evolution — some might say revolution — be a kind of conversion? I think so.

…There's an interesting thing, however, about conversions.

You hear about them.

You see, a conversion is a sea change, a rebirth, a turning point in your existence. You may become, as Christians say, a new creation, and you're at least a reformed old one. And you reflect your new state of being and often want to voice it.

And those around you will know about it.

As for this writer, everyone who knows me would say that my religious conversion was a seminal point in my life.

Now consider something. Barack Obama is one of the most famous, most discussed individuals on the planet. 

But we have not heard about any soul-changing conversion in his life.

Not a whisper.

Nothing. 

Nothing that could reconcile the flat-out Marxist-Leninist Obama was in his college days with the man he supposedly is today. There's no one who says, "Yeah, he was a radical guy in his youth, and I just couldn't believe how he became disenchanted with his old ideas."

Why, my friends, might this be?

Now, something else about conversions is that they often breed a person who hates what he has rejected as much as he once loved it. This is why ex-smokers can be the most ardent anti-smoking activists or why Christian converts can be the staunchest critics of secularism. But from Obama we see no visceral contempt for communism. What we do see, however, is a man who just a few years ago had an alliance with former Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, who called himself a “small c communist” and was caught on tape saying that 25 million capitalists may have to be killed to advance the Marxist program. Even more damnably, Obama appointed communists to office upon taking power. One of these was Van Jones, another man who called himself a communist; and former communications director Anita Dunn, who said that Mao Tse-tung — who murdered 60 to 70 million people — was one of her two favorite philosophers.

Unfortunately, for some people, this still isn’t enough to see a red flag and menace with regard to Barack Obama. Yet it doesn’t take a behavioral scientist from the FBI to draw proper conclusions from his profile. We have in the President a man who:

1. Had communist Frank Marshall Davis as childhood mentor.

2. Was a flat-out Marxist-Leninist in college.

3. Has no known history of renouncing these views.

4. Later in life built an alliance with a “small c” communist and other assorted radicals.

5. Upon achieving high office, appointed avowed communists to his administration.

Given this profile, what is the radical position? That the man is a communist or at least a communist sympathizer? Or that he is just your everyday moderate politician?

Perhaps we don’t have proof beyond a reasonable doubt that would stand up in a criminal proceeding for either of the above propositions. But asking for it is unreasonable and irresponsible. In the court of public opinion, there must be no higher burden than in a civil court: a preponderance of the evidence. And a preponderance of it in the President’s case points to a simple conclusion: Barack Obama is likely a communist or communist sympathizer.

Now, there are many reasons why people would deny what is plain about Obama. The most obvious is partisan loyalty, but there is another factor: The “it”-couldn’t-happen-here mentality.

All of this happened in just one week: One of the President’s ambassadors said Israel was to blame for anti-Semitism, his Secretary of Defense said Israel needs to “just get to the damn table” with negotiating partners who refuse to recognize its right to exist, and his Secretary of State criticized Israeli treatment of women as occasionally “unfair” while welcoming to Washington an organization which promotes censorship of speech about Islamism.

And this is the administration that has “done more in terms of the security of the state of Israel than any previous administration”?

We aren’t fooled.

In short, the Obama administration has taken the Islamist side, the side of anti-American, anti-Western, genocide-minded toward Israel, anti-Christian, and anti-women’s rights forces. It keeps insisting that these are harmless forces, even the “good guys” who will bring about true democracy.

As a result, every traditional Arab ally in the region has been betrayed, as well as Israel. Every real democratic movement in the region has been betrayed (Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, etc.) either by a failure to help them, by active U.S. help for their enemy, or both.

The results are predictably catastrophic. As the danger becomes increasingly obvious, as the Islamists show their fangs, the Obama administration will ignore it. As crises develop further, the Obama administration will either do nothing or side with the aggressors.

This kind of problem is totally unprecedented in the history of U.S. Middle East policy. There have, of course, been many mistakes. Yet policymakers have kept some ambiguity in analyzing these developments. The Obama administration has no doubts.

Previous policymakers who are professionals dedicated to protecting U.S. interests have been open-minded to recognizing that they were wrong and adjusting policy accordingly. By now, with the landslides for Islamists in Egypt and Tunisia they would have quickly changed course. The Obama administration is singularly closed-minded and, unfortunately, these bad tendencies are endorsed by much of the media and academic “experts” who, in the past, provided a critical perspective.

The president is systematically removing strong and knowledgeable people from top posts. The national security advisor and the secretary of defense are now political hacks, mere mouthpieces for Obama. While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has at times showed dissent, she has now been turned into a puppet either because she accepts the policy or is just going through the motions and counting the days until she leaves office, presumably to be replaced by another pawn of the White House

It is clear that Obama will neither learn nor change and if he is given a second term, the whirlwind will be reaped.

The prominent human rights organization American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), its Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) program and the Virginia Anti-Shariah Task Force (VAST) will be hosting the first-ever human rights conference dedicated to exposing the plight of women under Islamic law in Dearborn, Michigan on the anniversary of the honor murder of Jessica Mokdad: the Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference.

The minutiae of Obama's shady past is unlikely to even register a blip on voters' 2012 radar.  Americans no longer have to judge Obama on who he might be, or what he may or may not have done in the past.  They instead will judge him on his terrible stewardship of the economy, his failed initiatives, and his petty partisanship.  Nevertheless, I think it's always relevant to set the record straight and to expose the Team Obama's indignant 2008 assertions for what they were: Self-serving lies.  The Barack Obama that was masterfully sold to the American people three years ago was a fraud.  That should be relevant to voters as they weigh whether or not he deserves four more years to inflict his agenda upon an already-struggling nation.

Hispanic voters will desert Barack Obama at the next election because he has failed to provide the hope and change he promised and Republicans are their natural party anyway, leading Cuban-American Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen tells Newsmax.

Too many people think that immigration is the only thing Latinos are concerned about but that is simply not true, the House Foreign Affairs chairwoman said in the exclusive interview.

 “The Republican party is the party of small government, less government intrusion, small businesses, more economic freedom, and that goes to the heart of what the Hispanic community is all about,” the Florida legislator said.

“The growth in Hispanic small businesses in the United States is phenomenal and it’s because we’re seeing the opportunities exist,” she added. “The party needs to tailor its message, we don’t have to change our principles, but just be unafraid to appeal to the Hispanic voter.

“We tend to think that the Hispanic voter is all about immigration and if you’re not for amnesty, if you’re not for a comprehensive immigration reform, you won’t get the Hispanic vote. That is not true at all.

“Hispanics are pro-business, they’re very much pro-family and pro-community and they’re for safe schools and against drugs – all great American values. We should appeal to those voters all the time.

“Hispanics are a natural for the Republican party.”

Ros-Lehtinen, who was born in Havana and fled Fidel Castro’s regime as an 8-year-old with her parents, says that the Hispanic vote will be nothing like the more than 2-1 margin that sided with Obama over John McCain in 2008.

“The overwhelming Hispanic support is not going to be with Obama this time because they’re not going to be as enthusiastic to go out to vote,” she said.

“Obama had a lot of hope and a lot of change that he promised and the Hispanic community is saying by and large, ‘Que Pasa?’ what happened there? There’s no hope, there’s no change.

“It’s actually been a terrible economy, thanks to his leadership. He owns this economy, it’s his economy and Hispanics have suffered greatly because of it.”

Ros-Lehtinen said she supports continued economic sanctions against her native country even though it flies in the face of trading ties with other communist nations such as China.

She said when the embargo was introduced more than half a century ago, it was not to bring about an end to the Castro regime, but as a policy statement, similar to those against South Africa’s apartheid regime or Haiti’s military juntas.

And things haven’t changed. “The Cuba model is not like Egypt or Libya, it’s more related to North Korea where you have such an all-consuming police, authoritarian state,” she said,

“What we have seen is Fidel pass on power to Raoul and it’s essentially the same regime. Just a few days ago they passed so-called reform – this is so horrible – that allows people in Cuba to move to Havana without having to get so many government signatures. This is a horrid regime.

“I believe the embargo is the right policy. It’s not to bring the regime down but it’s to say this is a moral stand, this is a principled stand and we will have the embargo in place, we will not engage commercially with Cuba until there are free elections, free multiple parties allowed to exist, freedom of the press and freedom for political prisoners.

“That’s the right stance to have and it gives us leverage when Cuba does become free, we can have a free neighbor and a democratic ally so close to our shores.”

On other foreign policies, Ros-Lehtinen blasted Obama for failing to take a tough stance on Iran as it moves closer to getting nuclear weapons. “The Obama administration has had a weak policy on Iran since the first day,” she said.

That has made it difficult for the Republican-controlled House to pass meaningful sanctions against Tehran.

“We’ve had to water them down time and time again and the Iranians know that. The regime, the mullahs, the Supreme Leader, Ahmedinejad, all of them know that we’re very weak and our policy, in essence, is let Israel take care of it. That is a non-policy.”

She said it is time to tell overseas companies to make a choice. If they deal with Iran they will lose all business in the United States. “it’s Iran or the U.S. – you choose,” she said. “I think they’ll choose wisely.”

She said the United States has to be careful about the future of the Middle East.

“Benjamin Netanyahu has said that he feared that the Arab Spring may lead to an Iranian Winter and I think that that’s very true, not that I’m saying that Mubarak was a great guy; of course he wasn’t, he was a dictator and he abused human rights.

“We all want to get rid of dictators and thugs but to replace that with Shariah law or any kind of extreme philosophy is just two steps forward and three steps back.”

Ros-Lehtinen said that in the 10 months since the GOP regained control of the House it has passed 22 bills that would promote growth, but they have all been held up in the Senate.

“Can we produce legislation that is pro-economic growth without any taxes? Yes we can. We’ve done it 22 times – eliminated regulation, reformed the tax code, we have got the job done.

“It is not our fault that Harry Reid is sitting there doing I don’t know what, but he’s certainly not passing any meaningful legislation.”

 

WHEN he refused to disclose who donated money to his election campaign, as other candidates had done, it didn’t seem to matter.

WHEN he received endorsements from people like Louis Farrakhan, Mummar Kadaffi and Hugo Chavez,  it didn’t seem to matter.

WHEN it was pointed out that he was a total newcomer and had absolutely no experience at anything except community organizing, it didn’t seem to matter.

WHEN he chose friends and acquaintances such as Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn who were revolutionary radicals, it didn’t seem to matter.

WHEN his voting record in the Illinois Senate and in the U.S. Senate indicated an absentee senator, it didn’t seem to matter.

WHEN he refused to wear a flag lapel pin and did so only after a public outcry, it didn’t seem to matter.

Maryland increased government spending this year more than any state in the mid-Atlantic region, according to a study released Tuesday.

The Fiscal Survey of the States found that Maryland is slated to spend $14.7 billion in general funds during fiscal 2012, a $1.5 billion increase over the previous year. The 11.4 percent increase is the seventh-largest, compared to the other 49 states, according to the twice-annual study, which is sponsored by the National Governors Association and National Association of State Budget Officers.

State budgets throughout the country increased by an average of just 2.9 percent this fiscal year.

Maryland officials disputed the study’s findings, while conservative business groups seized upon the results as proof that Democratic leaders in the state have avoided making necessary cuts to help residents rebound from the economic downturn.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie ripped President Obama for the failure of the debt supercommittee, calling the president "a bystander in the Oval Office" in comments Monday.

“I was angry this weekend, listening to the spin coming out of the administration, about the failure of the supercommittee, and that the president knew it was doomed for failure, so he didn’t get involved. Well, then what the hell are we paying you for?” Christie said in Camden, N.J. " 'It’s doomed for failure, so I’m not getting involved'? Well, what have you been doing, exactly?”

President Barack Obama has won praise from the media — and from himself — for putting the White House visitor logs online. Yet the visitor logs may hide more than they reveal.

The White House is still holding back “tens of thousands” of visitor logs, according to congressional testimony last week by Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch, who also added that “the Obama administration is less transparent than the Bush administration.”

We also know that some of the most important presidential visitors don’t even walk into the White House. The administration meets K Street lobbyists at Caribou Coffee, and holds secret meetings in Jackson Place townhouses where there are no visitor logs.

The visitor logs that have been released are problematic, because they are simply lists of names, with no way to verify whether a specific name belongs to a particular person.

When the first names were released on Oct. 30, 2009, late on a Friday afternoon, then-White House “ethics czar” Norm Eisen noted the lists included “false positives” — “names that make you think of a well-known person, but are actually someone else.” According to Eisen, these included ordinary visitors named “Michael Jordan, William Ayers, Michael Moore, Jeremiah Wright, Robert Kelly (“R. Kelly”), and Malik Shabazz.”

A number of conservative bloggers noticed the names, but not Eisen’s blog post. With speed and precision suggesting direct coordination from the top, ThinkProgress, the core of the heavily funded John Podesta/George Soros “progressive” world, gleefully attacked its ideological foes for reporting “false positives.” The next release included “Louis Farrakhan” and “James Taylor,” but this time conservatives were more careful.

Yet there is no way to prove that the “false positives” really are false, because the White House refuses to reveal identifying information about visitors. In December 2009, citing visitor logs, Big Government reported that ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis had likely visited the White House on a special “staff tour” on September 5. The timing of Lewis’s visit — as the far-left regrouped in the aftermath of the health care town halls — seemed suspicious.

He wasn’t ready to be a US Senator and he wasn’t ready to be president either.

And because some Americans put White Guilt above common sense and thereby elected the most unready of candidates to the office of President of the United States, our economy is at a standstill.

But even more importantly, the country has, under Obama, once again lost a sense of its place and is questioning its historical mission of being the City on a Hill for the rest of the world.

Only 18 percent of Americans now believe that the country is on the right track, according to Rasmussen. The number has never been above 47 percent since Obama took office. The country reached it’s feel good moment at the six-month mark of the Democrat takeover of Congress, and it’s been downhill for Obama ever since. He now faces an 18 precent gap between those who strongly approve of his performance versus those who strongly disapprove according to Rasmussen.  

In a stinging rebuke of Mr Obama, who remained on the sidelines as the deal collapsed, and a rare intervention into Washington politics, Mr Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, said: "It's the chief executive's job to bring people together and to provide leadership. I don't see that happening."

He accused members of Congress of "political cowardice" for helping bring about a "disaster for the country" but the former Democrat and Republican who is now an Independent reserved his strongest words for Mr Obama.

"The executive branch must do more than submit a plan to a committee – and then step aside and hope the committee members take action. That's not how any CEO would run a business.

He added: "It's not how landmark pieces of legislation have gotten through Congress. Tough problems require determined, forceful and bold leadership – and real action."

Late night host Jimmy Fallon apologized to Michele Bachmann Tuesday after his house band played an offensive song as she walked on stage during an appearance on his show Monday.

Fallon's house band, The Roots, played "Lyin' Ass Bitch" by Fishbone to welcome her to the late night show—a song most people, including Bachmann, didn't notice until the Questlove, the band's drummer, hinted at it in a Twitter message.

The elitist-focused GOOD Worldwide, which calls itself a “platform for influentials and cultural creatives that engages them in thought and action around the ideas, people and businesses moving our world forward,” enthusiastically supports the Occupy Wall Street insurgents.

Before addressing the GOOD-OWS relationship, let’s take a look at GOOD itself.

A privately-held media company, the Los Angeles-based GOOD Worldwide LLC has been around since 2006. You may not have heard much about it unless you’re a college-educated, Starbucks coffee-drinking and WiFi-using, New York Times-reading, card-carrying progressive.

On its curiously Icelandic-registered website, good.is, GOOD describes itself thusly:

Two Democratic pollsters argue Obama should not run in 2012.

When Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson accepted the reality that they could not effectively govern the nation if they sought re-election to the White House, both men took the moral high ground and decided against running for a new term as president. President Obama is facing a similar reality—and he must reach the same conclusion.

He should abandon his candidacy for re-election in favor of a clear alternative, one capable not only of saving the Democratic Party, but more important, of governing effectively and in a way that preserves the most important of the president's accomplishments. He should step aside for the one candidate who would become, by acclamation, the nominee of the Democratic Party: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Never mind the abundant evidence of the violent impulses of the Occupy Wall Street movement: Democrats are happy to associate themselves with the movement by appropriating their language. Yesterday, Maryland Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski led what she called an “occupation” of the Joint Select Committee for Deficit Reduction (a.k.a. the Super Committee) to warn committee members not to cut Social Security or healthcare (h/t David Hauptmann):

“Are we ready to fight?” Mikulski asked the standing-room-only crowd at the event in support of Social Security held with Sens. Ben Cardin, D-Md., Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., and Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn.

The response? An emphatic “yes.”

“Social Security did not cause the deficit. It did not cause the debt,” Mikulski said. “My solution — let’s bring those troops home. Let’s bring our money back home, and let’s bring our jobs back home.”

What irresponsible fear-mongering on Mikulski’s part! Perhaps Social Security alone did not cause the deficit — but it’s absolutely a contributing factor. Combine it with the other major entitlement programs and it is arguably the largest driver of our debt and deficit problem. By 2049, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will consume all tax revenues. Medicare spending is adding to future deficits faster than any other spending.

Bill Randall is a candidate for Congress, running in North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District.  Mr. Randall also happens to be an African-American.  In early October, Randall had a campaign billboard vandalized with a spray-painted, vulgar phallic symbol, accompanied by the letters "KKK”. It was the kind of message that would normally launch the media into full-blown racial apoplexy. 

One small problem.  Bill Randall is a Tea Party Conservative Republican.

Despite filing a report with the Wake County Sheriff’s Department on October 9, holding a press conference regarding the incident, issuing a press release, and having a local news report linked at the Breitbart.tv website, nobody in major media outlets in Raleigh have covered the story.

Randall specifically called out the Raleigh News & Observer, saying that a press release of the incident was sent to their offices, but that “they apparently had no interest in covering the story.”

He believes this is a clear case of liberal media bias, stating that, “all of their coverage of me has been slanted, negatively biased, or altogether false.”

An e-mail to the News Observer received no response, but the publication does have a history of reporting politically motivated vandalism.  In November of 2007, they reported on lawn signs placed by the Democratic Party which were either stolen or vandalized.  In 2010, they ran a New York Times article in which vandalism of Gabby Gifford’s office was addressed.  And just ten days after Randall’s billboard was vandalized, the News Observer ran multiple reports involving messages being spray-painted on the door and glass-encased billboard of N.C. State University's GLBT Center, one in which the act was described as ‘hate bias’. 

But KKK on the billboard of a black conservative warrants no coverage?

Randall explains why he deserves respect, “I served honorably in the U.S. military for 27 years, and am willing to serve our nation once again in the U.S. Congress.”

He added, “I am not asking for favoritism, but I do ask for fair and equitable coverage of a horrible, disgraceful action that not only insulted me, but also the more than 92,000 constituents who cast their vote for me last Fall in the NC-13th Congressional District.”

Politicians who arrive in Washington as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires. Why?



The South, once solidly Democratic, is more solidly Republican than ever after the 2011 elections.

As the last state legislative races were called this week from the Nov. 8 votes in Virginia and Mississippi, the party of Abraham Lincoln now controls both chambers of every state legislature in the 11 former states of the Confederacy, with the sole exception of Arkansas. And Arkansas Republicans need to flip only a handful of seats in 2012 to make the trend unanimous.

None of this comes as welcome news for President Obama’s re-election campaign. In 2008, Mr. Obama was propelled to the White House in large part with breakthrough victories in such states as Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, but all three states now have Republican-led legislatures, with the GOP’s biggest gains in the 2010 elections.

The shift means that in swing states such as Florida, the GOP 2012 nominee will have a home-field advantage given the local balance of power.

The 2010 midterm vote was “a record-breaking year for Republicans in the state legislatures. There were a couple of benchmarks set that made it a banner year, and what the last election showed is that it hasn’t died down,” said Adam Temple, a spokesman for the Republican State Leadership Committee. “It doesn’t paint a pretty picture for Democrats in 2012.”

Ronald Perelman is the New York City-based leveraged buyout wheeler-dealer who controls Siga Technologies. He has donated nearly $130,000 mostly to Democrats over the past two election cycles alone, and he forked over $50,000 to pay for the president's lavish inaugural parties. A Siga affiliate pitched in nearly half a million more in contributions -- 65 percent of which went to Democrats -- and the firms have spent millions on lobbying.

Perelman's pharma company makes an experimental antiviral pill used by smallpox patients who received diagnoses too late to be treated with the existing smallpox vaccine. Smallpox experts cast doubt on the need for the drug given ample vaccine stockpiles, the remoteness of a mass attack and questions about its efficacy. But over the objections of federal contract negotiators, competitors and scientists, the Obama administration approved a lucrative $433 million no-bid deal for Siga in May. No other manufacturers were able to compete for the "sole source" procurement, according to the Los Angeles Times.