A deeply worrisome article appeared in the New York Times on Saturday (2/13/10).  It has received much attention on Monday’s radio programs.  The article by Peter Baker is entitled “Obama is Making Plans to Use Executive Power for Action on Several Fronts.”  Baker tells us that the President is “preparing an array of actions using his executive power to advance energy, environmental, fiscal, and other domestic policy priorities.”  And Baker continues with this observation, “Any president has vast authority to influence policy even without legislation, through executive orders, agency rule-making and administrative fiat.”

Translation:  now that various Obama legislative (i.e., democratic) efforts have failed, it is time to force his policies on the nation through the diktat available to the head of the American federal administrative state.  Of all the items mentioned in the article, the most destructive is probably the Administration’s plan to begin regulating carbon emissions via the Environmental Protection Agency.  This will be enormously costly for the American economy, and it comes at a time when the science supporting man-made climate change is collapsing.  (See these articles as evidence: here, here, here, here and here (listed on Mark Levin’s website.)  The collapse of scientific support may provide some minimal chance that the federal courts might block or alter EPA’s rulemaking efforts, but EPA clearly has the upper hand in any litigation.  Congress needs to eliminate EPA’s authority to regulate carbon emissions until some scientific clarity emerges.

In a slightly differently category is the Administration’s apparent decision to stop enforcing the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” which is statutorily mandated and has been in effect for approximately 16 years.  It seems axiomatic that if the administration wants to change the policy, Congress needs to change the law.

The article deals at length with presidential recess appointments, and President Obama’s threat to make use of them.  The use of “holds” by members of the Senate seems to have gotten out of hand.  All that said, the appointment power is far different from unilateral executive branch lawmaking – which was never remotely considered by our Founding Fathers.  And, here, we see plans for this constitutional abuse to be taken to new levels.

America is rapidly becoming a judicial and bureaucratic oligarchy.  This institutional development is a threat conservatives and libertarians need to focus on much more seriously.  This development is even more dangerous when coupled with the crony capitalism (corporatism) that is emerging from government ownership or subsidization of American industries.  The United States is beginning to resemble the corrupt England of George III’s era where commercial monopolies were sold by the Crown drawing the ire of the American colonists and men like Adam Smith.

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Well, I checked the facts, and the Politico was correct.  I only doubted the reporting due to the massive amount of President Obama’s proposed increase in education spending.  Could it possibly be true?  Tuesday’s February 2^nd Politico column by Eamon Javers and James Hohman on the newly released proposed federal budget contained this text on one of the “Winners” – Education:

Obama calls for ramped-up education spending. Department of Education outlays would increase from $32.4 billion in 2009 to $71.5 billion in 2011. Obama puts money into a laundry list of initiatives, from a $1.6 billion increase in child care funding to making permanent the expansion of Pell Grant payouts.

He has sought to please his supporters in the powerful teachers unions by pushing to rework the unpopular parts of Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. Now he’s trying to put $3 billion more into K-12 education generally, with up to an extra $1 billion if Congress reworks the education system in the way he wants this year.

If you look at the 2011 budget’s section for the Department of Education (pp. 63-68), go to page 68 and look for the line entitled “Total, Outlays.”  There one finds that the actual 2009 budget for the Dep’t of Education was $32.409 billion and that the projected amount for 2011 is $71.479 billion.  By my calculation that is a 121% increase in two years.

I am not an expert on direct loan programs, but on the same page the figures for disbursements increases from $100.7 billion (2009 actual) to $135.0 billion (2011 projected) – a 34% increase over two years.  This Congress wants to enact a statute to federalize the student loan programs, so the budget contains this gobbledygook comment: “This measure would then use savings to make historic investments to increase college access and success, and would lay a foundation for success for America’s youngest children.”  What does that mean?  $$,$$$,$$$,$$$.$$  Good grief.

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There were times during last night’s speech when reality seemed suspended: The President’s evident sincerity and earnestness were undermined by the caustic laughter that occasionally greeted his comments.  At other times, silence met his words.  And, in media theory courses across the land, analyses will be done of the number of times he looked to the Republican side of the aisle – he seemed far more concerned with the GOP responses to his remarks than those of his own party.  Maybe the spectre of another Joe Wilson moment (“You lie!”) had him jumpy.

More seriously, I wonder if his desperation to be liked is compelling him to try to woo his skeptics.  Of course, he won’t succeed.

It is hard not to like President Obama, at least the persona he projects in such settings as the State of the Union Address.  He seems so reasonable.

Yet his policies are those of a man of the Left.  It is as though he believes empathy is a substitute for substantive compromise, or that by virtue of patiently listening he can lull his opponents into political somnolence.

The speech, like the Obama presidency, was interwoven with unintended ironies:

** Mr. Obama calls for unity and patriotic oneness but simultaneously calls for open homosexuality in the military in a time of war.  He knows this will go nowhere, but throws the political bone to the homosexual lobby anyway.  Why?  Because he can say he tried (placating a key part of his base) while bearing no real consequence (the measure lifting the ban on gays in the military won’t succeed and so, given the relative inattention of the American people to this issue in a time of economic
crisis, there will little political price to pay for Democrats in November).

** He insists on taxpayer-subsidized abortion, resists litigation limits against health care providers and persists on wanting to micro-manage Americans’ medical care but urges Republicans to share with him their ideas about health reform – as though they have not already done so myriad times!

** He is all over the map on taxes, calls for yet another commission on entitlement reform (as if the several essential steps were not obvious, especially after many other such reform bills, panels, studies, commissions, select committees, etc.) and rewrites the economic history of the past decade — and does so with such seeming intensity that one wants to join him in the land of political make-believe.

The President needs to come to terms with some basic realities: People aren’t stupid.  Politicians aren’t children.  Civility doesn’t mean acquiescence.  And facts are stubborn things.

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Last week I wrote a blog post on Barack Obama’s conduct in what I called “Jack Bauer’s War.”  That is the war being conducted directly against the jihadists.  In the week since then we have discovered more disturbing information about the Obama administration’s performance in this conflict.  For example, Jeffrey Kuhner of the Washington Times asserted on his weekday radio show that it is now well-known that the underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was questioned for only 50 minutes before he was read his Miranda rights.  This is true.  See the Wall Street Journal article affirming these facts.

I argued that these “Jack Bauer” war issues are a political acid that are badly damaging Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

The national security issue has been mentioned as one that Scott Brown ran on but MSM reporting has not placed it as a first-tier issue in Massachusetts.  However, in Jamie Glazov’s interview with national security attorney and former prosecutor, Andy McCarthy, in Frontpage Magazine, we read the following (my emphasis):

McCarthy: …. The Brown campaign’s internal polling told them something very interesting.  While it’s true that healthcare is what nationalized the election and riveted everyone’s attention to it, it was the national security issues that put real distance between the two candidates in the mind of the electorate—in blue Massachusetts of all places. Sen.-elect Brown was able to speak forcefully and convincingly on issues like treating our jihadist enemies as combatants rather than mere defendants, about killing terrorists and preventing terrorism rather than contenting ourselves with prosecutions after Americans have been killed, about tough interrogation when necessary to save innocent lives.  Martha Coakley, by contrast, had to try to defend the indefensible, which is Obama-style counterterrorism.  It evidently made a huge difference to voters.

Similarly, the brilliant American-Israeli columnist for the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick, picked up on this as well.  She made note of Robert Costa’s National Review interview (1/19/2010) with Eric Fehrnstrom, the Brown campaign’s senior strategist.  Fehrnstrom made the following points about the national security issue:

On the issues, “people talk about the potency of the health-care issue, but from our own internal polling, the more potent issue here in Massachusetts was terrorism and the treatment of enemy combatants,” says Fehrnstrom. Health care, he says, was helpful in fundraising, but it was the campaign’s focus on national security in the final week that he believes helped to give voters another issue to associate with Brown…. (2^nd paragraph from bottom)

Wow.  KSM’s trial in NYC; the undie bomber trial’s in Detroit; moving / releasing Gitmo prisoners.  These are wounds that won’t stop bleeding.

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Franklin Roosevelt is not a hero of mine. Arguably the father of today’s big government and a president who never let the Constitution get in the way of his political agenda, FDR summoned a weird confection of Leftists, liberals and disaffected, vulnerable citizens to obtain election to the presidency no less than four times.

His legacy has led to serious problems in the courts, the economy and the way Americans understand their federal government. Yet there is still much to admire about the Democratic Roosevelt – the way he heartened Americans with his optimism, the masterful manner in which he spoke to the hopes and fears of ordinary people, and even his unabashed invocation of the God of the Bible in times of national need.

FDR was also nothing if not decisive. He did not dawdle in times of crisis. For better or ill, he acted. People knew that they had a leader in the White House.

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Imagine my surprise, amusement and satisfaction upon reading an Associated Press story in the Tuesday (12/1/2009) Washington Times entitled “Obama seen not unlike Mr. Spock.”  You see I had been claiming that President Obama resembled a Vulcan for about a year-and-a-half – that is long before he was elected president.

The only problem with the A.P. story is that the president doesn’t resemble Spock – he resembles the Vulcan Tuvok from a later iteration of the show.  (Yes, that would be the indescribably terrible Voyager. The show with Captain Janeway and Neelix — the most P.C. of all.  The one with the Indian shaman.  Didn’t the men wear dresses?  Hide the razor blades.  The memories of it are returning.)

Well, Tuvok was played by an African-American actor, Tim Russ, and Russ bears an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Obama.  One eco-Trekkie agrees; go here and see Obama in Tuvok’s uniform.  Or this on Facebook (“Barack Obama Is Actually Tuvok.”  Yes, we have never seen both of them at the same time.)

Lorne Michaels of Saturday Night Live, give Tim Russ’s agent a call and sign him to a three-year two-month contract with a renewal option.  Russ is your dead-ringer Obama impersonator, but he needs to wear the Vulcan ears when playing the President or the gag won’t work.  (Lorne, it shouldn’t have taken this long to figure this one out.)

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On a more serious note, this Vulcan thing is now having political implications.  So says A.P.’s Seth Borenstein who writes, “President Obama’s Spock-like qualities have started to cause him political problems in real-world Washington. Critics see him as too technocratic, too deliberative, too lacking in emotion.”  No kidding.  (The A.P. article appears to be an attempt to spin Obama’s bloodlessness to be a positive – a nerdy love for science.  It isn’t.)

Obama’s Vulcanism seemed completely obvious to me.  He’s a great orator, but he has none of the warmth of a Ronald Reagan or a Bill Clinton.  They would light up a room when they entered.  Obama’s different.  I was always struck by images of Obama sitting next to some poor shlub in an Iowa diner at breakfast with the other guy looking like he wanted to take his pancakes and run away.  No one-on-one rapport.  None.

That doesn’t make someone a Vulcan, however.  Unfortunately, Obama has a detached, rationalism that is incapable of projecting any empathy.  Combine that with his general demeanor, and you start getting a Vulcan.  Even the patrician Bush the Elder could shed a tear occasionally.  One doesn’t have to go Dick Vermeil to beat the Vulcan tag, but I don’t think I have ever seen Obama come close to choking up.

The greatest example of Obama’s Vulcanism occurred when the president hosted ABC’s propagandistic Health Care Day at the White House.  He told a woman whose 100+ year-old mother had a pacemaker that under his scheme her mother’s zest for life wouldn’t have gotten her the device that kept her alive.  You could almost hear the utilitarian Vulcan maxim: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”  “Your mother’s Death Panel does not approve of pacemaker’s for 100 year-olds.”  “So, we’ll give your mother some painkillers and send her on her way to go die in Vulcan Valhalla.”  (Actually, that’s a pretty close approximation of what Obama did say.)

Who knows how this will all end up, but articles like this one in the Washington Times demonstrate that the public is starting to look at Mr. Obama much differently.  And the media spins on.

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Once again, the Internet is alive with pictures of the President of the United States bowing low before some foreign monarch. Barack Obama first showed the world his behind as he bowed before the odious King of Saudi Arabia at a London summit last winter. That was bad. The king of Saudi Arabia rules a desert fiefdom where those who convert to Christianity are beheaded while the regime looks the other way. Bibles are banned. Jews are not allowed even to enter the country.

That bow was atrocious. But Obama’s low bow before the Emperor of Japan over the past weekend was bad enough. Barack Obama apparently never memorized the Pledge of Allegiance as a boy. He has told us many times of his grade school education in Indonesia and how his devoted mother taught him U.S. constitutional law before dawn. Apparently, he never learned “…and to the republic for which it stands…”

To secure our Independence and to found a new republic, a country where “We the people” ruled, was the Glorious Cause for which the Founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. How actually to be republicans with a small “r” was not easy.

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President Obama spoke to an interviewer about the Ft. Hood shootings. He had just come from the Memorial Service for the fourteen people whose lives were taken by the terrorist, Nidal Hasan:

OBAMA:  In a country of 300 million people, there are going to be acts of violence that are inexplicable, even within the extraordinary military that we have. I think everybody understands how outstanding the young men and women in uniform are under the most severe stress.  There are going to instances, in which an individual cracks.

Forget, for the moment, this confused part of the statement that seems to psychologize the killer’s actions. I want to focus on the “inexplicable” part.

This is a serious problem for liberals. They are forever finding such murderous acts inexplicable. They often employ words like “random” and “senseless acts of violence.” One of their favorite bumper stickers is “Practice random acts of kindness.” Random is okay if it’s kind. But if kindness and terror are truly random, what’s the moral difference?

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President Obama was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for 2009. His nomination had to have been entered by February 1st of this year. At that point, as many incredulous pundits have noted, he had been President for just eleven days. Fast work.

Many commentators have ridiculed the choice. “Gobsmacked,” wrote the Washington Post’s serious liberal foreign policy columnist, Jim Hoagland. He employed a British slang term for “slack-jawed in utter amazement.” Liberal writer Ruth Marcus likened the award to Pee-Wee Soccer, where every child gets a trophy just for playing. The New York Times’ house conservative, David Brooks, jeered that Obama should have won all of this year’s prizes, including those for economics and literature. Even for chemistry. After all, Obama’s personal chemistry may be his greatest contribution to the world.

Newsweek’s Howard Fineman called Obama “President of the Earth” and said he would accept in Oslo in December. Even long-time Obama promoters were hard-pressed to see the award as anything but miraculous–an effort, perhaps, by the Nobel Prize selection committee–Norwegian Leftists all–to create their own version of the Burning Bush. Saturday Night Live had fun. Their Obama lookalike noted that he had only nine months of experience “not being George Bush.

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I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding.

Those were President Obama’s words in an interview with editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade. The President was explaining his openness to a federal bailout of struggling big-city daily newspapers. For that reason, Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) have introduced S. 673, their so-called “Newspaper Revitalization Act.”

These two very liberal senators should have acted even sooner. They should have sponsored the Manual Typewriter Preservation Act. You see, the computer revolution put great pressure on Royal, Underwood, and Olivetti. Those companies represented thousands of jobs. We can’t just let the free market run rampant. Save typewriter ribbons! Save white-out! Save carbon paper! There’s no telling how much damage these new-fangled computers might do.

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[Script follows after the jump]

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“Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all. Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality.” – Barack Obama

Then-Senator Obama made this statement during his speech to Jim Wallis’ “Call to Renewal” conference in 2006.  Note two things:

(1)   He effectively denies the commonality of natural law and the conscience – the foundation of the “universal values” he commends – and links opposition to abortion only to the revelation of Scripture.

(2)   He also suggests that opposing abortion cannot be justified by our “common reality.”

As the first point, is the President prepared to argue that no “self evident truths” exist?  Is the assertion that “all men are created equal” and have rights endowed to them by a Creator too culture-specific for Mr. Obama?  And is the validity of these assertions determined simply by the number of people who agree with them?

As to the second point, is the “common reality” determined by the 50 percent plus one?  If so, did the “common reality” of the Japanese military state in the 1930s surely justify the rape of Nanking?

Mr. Obama calls for our being “amenable to reason.”  Yet he is unreasonable in refusing seriously to interact with the irrefutable scientific evidence that personhood begins at conception and, if so, that every person has value independent of his or her mother from that moment – and therefore possesses and should obtain a legally-recognized right to life.

Perhaps the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer captured it all most clearly:

Destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder.

Ethics (New York; Macmillan, 1965), pp. 175-6.

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(Transcript after the jump)

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As the health care debate heats up it is hard to get straightforward, understandable information on the nuts and bolts of how Obamacare will operate.  Big picture, no trees, no weeds. That’s what we need.  Well, there was an extremely powerful eight minute interview on Mark Levin’s radio show last Friday (July 17, 2009) that you must listen to.  (We make it easy to do so below.)

Mark Levin interviewed Betsy McCaughey, adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute and the chairman and founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, about the Obama Administration’s health care plan.  She clearly and frighteningly describes provisions of the current House bill that will reduce care for the elderly and compel all programs to provide regimented, HMO-style care for the rest of us.  (FYI, McCaughey served also as the Lt. Governor of New York from Jan. 1995 to Dec. 1998.)

If you would like to listen we are going to provide two ways to do so. First, you can click here and listen or listen below to the eight minute interview using the Family Research Council website:

We want to heartily thank “The Mark Levin Show” for most graciously giving FRC permission to play the audio from our website.

You can listen or download the entire Friday, July 17, 2009 program from Mark Levin’s website – this is his “Audio” webpage.  Once on the Audio page, do the following: 1) click on “07/17 The Mark Levin Show;” and, 2) start the player at 8 minutes, 45 seconds.

I believe this audio will sharpen your focus on the key features of the health bill.

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The Washington Post last year admitted that it had “leaned” toward Barack Obama in the presidential race. That’s ridiculous. The Leaning Tower of Pisa leans, but it still stands. The Post and the rest of the liberal media fell over flat for him. Chris Matthews admitted to feeling a tingling going up and down his leg. The rest just wrote like that.

President Obama’s Mideast trip has been hailed as a “new beginning.” Indeed it is. Obama very pointedly did not visit Jerusalem on this his first trip to the region.

Liberal Democrat Harry Truman dared to recognize Israel in 1948 – minutes after the struggling Jewish state was born – and minutes before Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the Arab world tried to strangle the infant in its crib. Republican Richard Nixon – despised by the liberal media – saved Israel’s life by re-supplying her with arms during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

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On Monday in an interview with French journalist, Laura Haim, President Obama spoke about the purpose for his trip to the Middle East. During the interview, which you can read on the White House website, the President stated the following:

…I think that the United States and the West generally, we have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam. And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslims Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world. And so there’s got to be a better dialogue and a better understanding between the two peoples.

What?

In April, on his trip to Turkey, President Obama said, “we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation…”

So, according to President Obama we are not a Christian nation, but we are one of the largest Muslim countries in the world?

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Here is Tony Perkins’ statement on President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sotomayer. Her record makes one wonder… is she a legislator or a jurist?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 26, 2009 CONTACT: J.P. Duffy or Maria Donovan, (866) FRC-NEWS

Sotomayor: A Policy Maker or a Jurist?

Washington, D.C. – This morning President Obama announced his nominee to the nation’s highest court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Family Research Council Action President Tony Perkins released the following statement:

“President Obama has chosen a nominee with a compelling personal story over a judicial pick with a solid constitutional judicial philosophy. A compelling personal story is no substitute for allegiance to the Constitution and its sound application to public life.

“Judge Sotomayor’s failure to premise her decisions on the text of the Constitution has resulted in an extremely high rate of reversal before the high court to which she has been nominated.

“With that fact in mind Judge Sotomayor appears to subscribe to a very liberal judicial philosophy that considers it appropriate for judges to impose their personal views from the bench. President Obama promised us a jurist committed to the ‘rule of law,’ but, instead, he appears to have nominated a legislator to the Supreme Court.

“For example, in 2001 when delivering the Judge Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Lecture at the University of California-Berkeley Law School, Sotomayor stated: ‘I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.’

“Needless to say, that statement is troubling – if not offensive – on many levels. As the distinguished legal reporter Stuart Taylor of the National Journal observed about that speech and of Sotomayor, ‘her thinking is representative of the Democratic Party’s powerful identity-politics wing.’

“In a 2005 panel discussion at the Duke University Law School that can be seen on YouTube and cable news channels, the judge stated that the U.S. Court of Appeals is ‘where policy is made.’

“With all due respect to Judge Sotomayor, our constitution states otherwise and public surveys indicate that the American public understands this constitutional principle and want judges who interpret the law and do not act as life-tenured judicially empowered social workers.

“The Family Research Council expects the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the entire Senate to fully examine and publicly present an accurate picture of Judge Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy to the American public before they vote on her nomination.”

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