Obama’s campaign for class resentment

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In the first month of his presidency, Barack Obama averred that if in three years he hadn’t alleviated the nation’s economic pain, he’d be a “one-term proposition.”

When three-quarters of Americans think the country is on the “wrong track” and even Bill Clinton calls the economy “lousy,” how then to run for a second term? Traveling Tuesday to Osawatomie, Kan., site of a famous 1910 Teddy Roosevelt speech, Obama laid out the case.

It seems that he and his policies have nothing to do with the current state of things. Sure, presidents are ordinarily held accountable for economic growth, unemployment, national indebtedness (see Obama, above). But not this time. Responsibility, you see, lies with the rich.

Or, as the philosophers of Zuccotti Park call them, the 1 percent. For Obama, these rich are the ones holding back the 99 percent. The “breathtaking greed of a few” is crushing the middle class. If only the rich paid their “fair share,” the middle class would have a chance. Otherwise, government won’t have enough funds to “invest” in education and innovation, the golden path to the sunny uplands of economic growth and opportunity.

Where to begin? A country spending twice as much per capita on education as it did in 1970 with zero effect on test scores is not underinvesting in education. It’s mis-investing. As for federally directed spending on innovation — like Solyndra? Ethanol? The preposterously subsidized, flammable Chevy Volt?

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Read more at WashingtonPost.com HERE.

In U.S., Fear of Big Government at Near-Record Level

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Americans’ concerns about the threat of big government continue to dwarf those about big business and big labor, and by an even larger margin now than in March 2009. The 64% of Americans who say big government will be the biggest threat to the country is just one percentage point shy of the record high, while the 26% who say big business is down from the 32% recorded during the recession. Relatively few name big labor as the greatest threat.

Historically, Americans have always been more concerned about big government than big business or big labor in response to this trend question dating back to 1965. Concerns about big business surged to a high of 38% in 2002, after the large-scale accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom. An all-time-high 65% of Americans named big government as the greatest threat in 1999 and 2000. Worries about big labor have declined significantly over the years, from a high of 29% in 1965 to the 8% to 11% range over the past decade and a half.

Almost half of Democrats now say big government is the biggest threat to the nation, more than say so about big business, and far more than were concerned about big government in March 2009. The 32% of Democrats concerned about big government at that time — shortly after President Obama took office — was down significantly from a reading in 2006, when George W. Bush was president.

By contrast, 82% of Republicans and 64% of independents today view big government as the biggest threat, slightly higher percentages than Gallup found in 2009.

Lower percentages of Democrats, Republicans, and independents are now concerned about big business than was the case in 2009.

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Read more at Gallup.com HERE.

Pro-life leaders weigh in on Sebelius’ Plan B call

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WASHINGTON, December 9, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In the days after Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius put the kibosh on the FDA’s plans to give minors over-the-counter access to the morning-after pill, numerous speculations have arisen as to how one of the most pro-abortion politicians in the United States – as well as Barack Obama himself – found themselves at odds with the nation’s top abortion lobbies.

The FDA on Wednesday responded to a request from the drug’s manufacturer, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, to consider eliminating the need for a prescription.

But in announcing the final decision, FDA Administrator Margaret Hamburg noted that, while Sebelius had struck down the change, Hamburg herself felt the pill should be free for use by “all females of child-bearing potential,” hinting at a a clash at the highest levels of the administration. Sebelius later explained in her own letter that, especially as such a move would expose the powerful drug to girls as young as 11, the lack of data on Plan B’s effects on younger girls prevented her approval.

While claiming no involvement in the actual decision, President Obama agreed that “the reason Kathleen made this decision is that she could not be confident that a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old going to a drugstore should be able – alongside bubble gum or batteries – be able to buy a medication that potentially, if not used properly, could have an adverse effect.”

Abortion advocates such as the Center for Reproductive Rights and NARAL Pro-Choice America were aghast at the news: NARAL president Nancy Keenan complained that “we expected this kind of action from the Bush administration.” The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) responded several hours later in a press release that it was “extremely disapointed.” PPFA president Cecile Richards followed up on Thursday with a public letter requesting a meeting with Sebelius, and on Friday with a critical editorial in the Huffington Post.

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 Read More at lifesitenews.com By Kathleen Gilbert, lifesitenews.com

Patriots to Rally Tuesday as Holder Plans Major Announcement on Voting Laws

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Just when you thought Attorney General Eric Holder couldn’t get more sordid and arrogant, he has. His testimony last week before the House Judiciary Committee took the scandal plagued Justice Department into territory not traveled since John Mitchell worked overtime to conceal administration wrongdoing nearly four decades ago. Even Chairman Darrell Issa recognizes the comparison is appropriate.

On Tuesday, Americans will have a rare chance to voice their disdain of the corruption and lies flowing from this Justice Department. They will have a chance to speak out against the radical and racialist law enforcement priorities of this Justice Department. Eric Holder comes to Austin, Texas to make a major announcement about voting laws, probably to acquiesce to some loud demand of the NAACP to block state efforts to ensure voter integrity. But a counter-rally organized by Catherine Engelbrecht and True the Vote will greet Eric Holder’s appearance in Austin, Texas at the LBJ Library at 4 p.m. America is invited, and here is a flier with details.

You have a First Amendment right to petition your government for redress of grievances. Use it. So rarely has so much been worth grieving.

As bad as Watergate was, it didn’t involve hundreds of murders, dead American law enforcement agents, and the illegal distribution of thousands of firearms. How long has it been since an Attorney General appeared before Congress and words such as “contempt” and “impeachment” were used by members as they were last week?

The Fast and Furious scandal isn’t the only mess overseen by Eric Holder. His entire tenure has been characterized by racialist radicalism, disguised to some critics as mere incompetence. But it is far worse than incompetence, and to think otherwise is a mistake. From the dismissal of the voter intimidation case against racist anti-Semitic New Black Panther thugs, to the Mirandizing of battlefield captures in Afghanistan, Holder has presided over a systemic radicalization of the most powerful federal agency. This isn’t incompetence. It is radicalism.

Read More at Big Government By J. Christian Adams, Big Government

Perry Going For Broke In Iowa With 3 Weeks To Go

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Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry is fighting for his political life in Iowa.

Four month ago, the Texas governor was seen as conservatives’ national savior. But with three weeks before Iowa’s leadoff caucuses, Perry is retooling his message from the strict jobs focus he started with in August to one promoting him as a conservative outsider who will fight “special interests.”

He has also fallen back on his Christian faith, with two recent ads promoting Christian themes. The bulk of his recent Iowa campaigning has been at forums sponsored by conservative evangelical groups.

The strategy change is a sign of the pressure he faces to revive his faltering campaign. So far, it’s unclear if it’s working.

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 Read More at Official Wire By Thomas Beaumont, AP and Official Wire

Emails: ATF ‘Sting’ Just An Excuse For Gun Control

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While most mainstream media outlets have refused to report on this, newly uncovered emails show that one of the aims, if not the chief aim, of Operation Fast and Furious was to forward an anti-gun agenda.

Operation Fast and Furious was a failed sting operation by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. If you don’t know what Fast and Furious is, blame the media and its reluctance to cover complicated stories that paint Democrats and other leftists in a bad light. Apparently, old-fashioned hard-hitting journalism is not worth the effort unless it taints a conservative.

Because of this, most people will never know there might actually be something more nefarious to the scheme than just a poorly planned and executed sting operation. In fact, it might not even have been a sting operation at all but rather a veiled attempt to further restrict the Second Amendment rights of Americans.

The ATF, in 2009 and 2010, encouraged gun dealers to sell more than 2,000 guns, mostly AK-47s and .50-caliber rifles, to smugglers. The idea, ostensibly, was to catch the “big fish” and to stem the flow of illegal weapons into Mexico.

This plan was so colossally stupid that even a government bureaucrat should have recognized it as such.

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 Read More at Floyd Reports By Thomas J. Lucente, Jr., officialwire.com

Michele Bachmann Fights Like A Girl

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It has been more than thirty years since Margaret Thatcher altered the Western political landscape, helping to save the world from Soviet expansionism while coming as near as anyone could to saving England itself from the cultural and economic quagmire that, since her departure, has continued to deepen. Nevertheless, over the past few months the most serious female presidential candidate in U.S. history—and the one most similar in principles to the early Thatcher—has been treated as an also-ran by both the mainstream and Republican-leaning media, as well as subjected to unfounded accusations of incompetence or instability—from conservatives.

There was Tim Pawlenty’s suggestion that her susceptibility to headaches (an ailment she shares with Thomas Jefferson) renders her unfit to govern. Then there was George Will’s judgment, apparently pulled straight out of the ether, that she could not be trusted with her finger on the nuclear trigger. (They said the same of Reagan.) Perhaps the concern is that if she had a headache and went stumbling blindly in search of her painkillers, she might inadvertently hit The Big Red Button, thus starting World War III. Never having been in the White House, I had naively assumed there would be safeguards to prevent such a mishap, like secret codes and a military chain of command and stuff; but Will and Pawlenty, who have been in the White House, seem to think it’s a possibility, so who am I to object?

No, I do not believe that the Republican Establishment’s objection to Bachmann is that she’s a woman. The objection, rather, is that she is not a man—where by “man” I mean “an accredited member of the Washington Insider’s Club.” She doesn’t talk the way we expect modern politicians to talk. Her public persona, in debates and interviews, does not fall easily within the accepted norms of TV-age politicians. She tends to speak in bold colors. She talks about over-arching issues much more comfortably than about niggling details. She delineates issues with a view to their long-term ramifications, where long-term does not mean two years, but two decades, or two generations. Worst of all, she infuses all issues about which she speaks with a moral tinge—which is to say that she instinctively hones in on the moral implications of public policy, rather than merely on the pragmatic, outcome-oriented aspect of decision-making.

This last trait, the morality-colored glasses, is particularly troubling to today’s Establishment types, for whom politics is about winning, at least as much as it is about being right. Bachmann speaks to those who would lose the fight without losing their souls, rather than win a hollow victory. A Gingrich or Romney presidency would be hollow victory on a grand scale, sucking the wind out of America’s burgeoning constitutionalist revival while doing little—or, more likely, nothing—to change the fundamental premises of the Establishment’s workings. That is to say, the multi-generational project of rekindling the notion of a constitutional republic, not only in rhetoric but in practice, will require more than lip-service critiques of the current Establishment’s follies. It will require the slow, bottom-up creation of a new Establishment. Establishmentarianism, per se, is not the problem; George Washington was the Establishment in his time. The challenge is to transmogrify the Establishment into something noble, something with purposes and ideals higher than the next election cycle.

Joseph Conrad said that women hate irony. He meant it as a criticism; as they are more inclined towards naive belief in the good, the true and the beautiful, women are more likely to be angered than pleased at the cleverness that undercuts and casts doubt upon fundamental principles. Conrad, however, was writing in an age in which irony was an intellectual art, a means of broadening understanding by way of refusing to allow the mind to say “Stop here.” Today, we live in an age of universalized, and hence diminished, irony. Everyone is wised-up; everyone sees through everything; everyone thinks that matters of the most crushing importance are merely intellectual games, mass media games, power games. In such a morally decrepit climate, irony is not a means of enlightenment. It is just a fancy name for cynicism, which is the enemy of enlightenment.

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 Read More at Canada Free Press By Daren Jonescu, Canada Free Press

Yergin Cites Huge US Oil Potential

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The good news about future US energy supplies just keeps coming. In today’s Wall Street Journal Daniel Yergin, easily the country’s most thoughtful energy student, projects that US oil production is headed to grow by another 2 million barrels a day by 2020 — an increase of more than 50 percent in our current oil production. At that level, the US would be producing almost as much oil as Saudi Arabia.

That estimate, rosy as it is, assumes slower growth in offshore production due to the consequences of the Gulf blowout and is based entirely on onshore production. If offshore growth resumes, we could do even better.

Throw that together with the new Canadian oil production coming on line and the natural gas boom and it seems clear that instead of being a drag on the US economy, energy is going to be one of the forces propelling us into a new and more prosperous era.

Yergin’s predictions underscore the importance of making sure we move intelligently and quickly to develop appropriate regulations for the new forms of energy extraction so that we can ramp up production while taking reasonable precautions to protect the environment. Gas and oil production produce high wage blue collar jobs — exactly the kind the country needs to raise middle class living standards and address problems like inequality. The environmental issues surrounding shale gas and oil and the exploitation of the oil sands are real, but we have to think of these as problems that must be solved, not as barriers to action.

A secure and reasonably priced energy supply won’t just create jobs in extraction; it gives investors and manufacturers more reason to locate their facilities in the United States. The President and Congress need to get energy policy right; if the millennial generation is going to have the kind of opportunity past American generations have known, the oil and the gas need to flow.

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 Read More at The American Interest By Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest