op ed review 6/28

THIS WEEK’S NEWS

“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has put cap-and-trade legislation on a forced march through the House…. It looks as if the Democrats will have to destroy the discipline of economics to get it done. Despite House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman's many payoffs to Members, rural and Blue Dog Democrats remain wary of voting for a bill that will impose crushing costs on their home-district businesses and consumers. The leadership's solution to this problem is to simply claim the bill defies the laws of economics.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124588837560750781.html

Newt Gingrich: “The reality is that the bill before the House today imposes what could be the largest tax increase in history on the American people. And every single one of us who heats a home, drives a car, and manufactures or consumes products made in America will pay the price. Estimates are that the Waxman-Markey bill will raise electricity prices by an astounding 90 percent. It will raise gasoline prices by 74 percent. It will raise the average American family's energy bill by $1,500 each year. And, far from creating jobs, experts predict that the global warming bill will destroy 1,105,000 jobs on average each year, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by over 2,479,000 jobs. All in all, the bill is expected to reduce our gross domestic production (GDP) by $9.6 trillion. And for what?

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Cap-and-Trade-is-another-way-of-saying-2_2_5-7882637-49117697.html

In Dearborn, Michigan, where the local mosque's call to prayer is broadcast over the town by loudspeakers, a group of Christian evangelists were told that they could not pass out Bibles on the sidewalk during a festival.

http://spectator.org/archives/2009/06/26/a-religious-test

Despite ABC’s best efforts,: President Obama’s town hall meeting on health care delivered a sickly rating Wednesday evening. “Is he losing his charm?”

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/rubin/71441

In a rare moment of candor, President Obama explained to an audience how government-run healthcare would work in America: one way to shave medical costs is to stop expensive procedures performed on old people.

http://spectator.org/blog/2009/06/25/obama-wants-to-let-those-pesky

The day after Barack Obama’s largely passed over infomercial is the ideal time to review the George Soros funded Project on Death in America. Soros is a notorious advocate of the assisted suicide campaign…. in reality, the project is a drive to provide palliative care rather than treatment for gravely ill patients:… If we fail to abort Obama-Soros care, “involuntary euthanasia” will become part of standard medical treatment.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/12332

Who stands to benefit the most from Mark Sanford’s troubles? Pew finds that Mitt Romney has made his biggest gain among so-called independent voters. Back in 2008, just 29 percent of that important voting bloc had a favorable view of Romney, while 46 percent didn’t like him. Today, those numbers have-- to use a phrase that haunted Romney during the campaign--flip-flopped. Now, 44 percent of independents view Romney favorably.

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/thegaggle/archive/2009/06/25/palin-still-rules-but-romney-is-gaining.aspx

Top Republicans and Democrats across Alaska are quietly lining up to run for governor amid growing speculation that Sarah Palin will not seek reelection in 2010. A number of Democrats and Republicans believe her silence is a sign she will not pursue a second term as governor so that she can play a larger role on the national political stage.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/24051.html

Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that's what they want to do. Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090622/ap_on_re_us/us_rubber_rooms

At last, there's a place in America where tax cutting to promote growth and attract jobs is back in fashion. Who would have thought it would be Maine? This month the Democratic legislature and Governor John Baldacci broke with Obamanomics and enacted a sweeping tax reform that is almost, but not quite, a flat tax.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124571672694839297.html

A month after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's showdown with the CIA over interrogation techniques, just 38 percent of Americans approve of her job performance, while 45 percent disapprove

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/22/AR2009062202972.html

Unbelievable: Rep Barney Frank is calling on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to relax recently tightened standards for mortgages on new condominiums.

http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-Housing/idUSTRE55L39120090622

The reason for the firing of the Americorps Inspector General becomes more obvious: “As a favorite program of Barack and Michelle Obama, AmeriCorps was enjoying a higher profile than ever before. The Corporation also stood to receive vast amounts of new funding from the $5.7 billion Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, which would triple the size of AmeriCorps. And in the midst of that, here was the agency's inspector general saying he might re-open an investigation into an embarrassing episode involving hundreds of thousands of mis-spent dollars and a politically prominent supporter of the president.”

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/AmeriCorps-feared-bad-press-if-IG-investigation-continued-48998746.html

Hunters, whittlers and Boy Scouts, beware - your knives may soon be on the government's chopping block. The Obama administration wants to expand the 50-year-old ban on importing ''switchblades'' to include folding knives that can be opened with one hand, stirring fears the government may on the path to outlawing most pocket knives.

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/24/bid-to-expand-knife-ban-doesnt-cut-it-with-critics/

The Rev. Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh became the first archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America, established after a break with the US Episcopal Church over the issue of ordaining gays as priests.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20090625/ts_csm/aarchbishop

Judge Sonia Sotomayor has a narrow view of the Second Amendment that contradicts the Court’s landmark decision in District of Columbia v. Heller. A heated debate has started in the U.S. Senate over her opposition to the right to keep and bear arms.

http://townhall.com/columnists/SandyFroman/2009/06/24/nra_members_must_oppose_sotomayor

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THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN

Thomas Sowell 6/23

A Gallup poll last week showed that far more Americans describe themselves as "conservatives" than as "liberals." Yet Republicans have been clobbered by the Democrats in both the 2008 elections and the 2006 elections.

In a country with more conservatives than liberals, it is puzzling-- in fact, amazing-- that we have the furthest left President of the United States in history, as well as the furthest left Speaker of the House of Representatives. Republicans, especially, need to think about what this means. If you lose when the other guy has all the high cards, there is not much you can do about it. But, when you have the high cards and still keep taking a beating, then you need to re-think how you are playing the game.

The current intramural fighting among Republicans does not necessarily mean any fundamental re-thinking of their policies or tactics. These tussles among different segments of the Republican Party may be nothing more than a long-standing jockeying for position between the liberal and conservative wings of that party.

The stakes in all this are far higher than which element becomes dominant in which party or which party wins more elections. Both the domestic and the foreign policy direction of the current administration in Washington are leading this country into dangerous waters, from which we may or may not be able to return. A quadrupling of the national debt in just one year and accepting a nuclear-armed sponsor of international terrorism like Iran are not things from which any country is guaranteed to recover. Just two nuclear bombs were enough to get Japan to surrender in World War II. It is hard to believe that it would take much more than that for the United States of America to surrender-- especially with people in control of both the White House and the Congress who were for turning tail and running in Iraq just a couple of years ago.

Perhaps people who are busy gushing over the Obama cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their grand-daughters to live under sharia law.

The glib pieties in Barack Obama's televised sermonettes will not stop Iran from becoming a nuclear terrorist nation. Time is running out fast and we will be lucky if it doesn't happen in the first term of this president. If he gets elected to a second term -- which is quite possible, despite whatever economic disasters he leads us into-- our fate as a nation may be sealed.

Unfortunately, the only political party with any chance of displacing the current leadership in Washington is the Republican Party. That is why their internal squabbles are important for the rest of us who are not Republicans.

The "smart money" says that the way for the Republicans to win elections is to appeal to a wider range of voters, including minorities, by abandoning the Ronald Reagan kinds of positions and supporting more of the kinds of positions that Democrats use to get elected. This sounds good on the surface, which is as far as many people go, when it comes to politics.

A corollary to this is that Republicans have to come up with alternatives to the Democrats' many "solutions," rather than simply be nay-sayers.

However plausible all this may seem, it goes directly counter to what has actually happened in politics in this generation. For example, Democrats studiously avoided presenting alternatives to what the Republican-controlled Congress and the Bush administration were doing, and just lambasted them at every turn. That is how the Democrats replaced Republicans at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Ronald Reagan won two elections in a landslide by being Ronald Reagan-- and, most important of all-- explaining to a broad electorate how what he advocated would be best for them and for the country. Newt Gingrich likewise led a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives by explaining how the Republican agenda would benefit a wide range of people. Neither of them won by pretending to be Democrats. It was precisely the Republican "moderates"-- Bob Dole and John McCain-- who lost disastrously to Democrats who were initially little known individuals but who knew how to talk.

Edited from a longer column:

http://townhall.com/Columnists/ThomasSowell/2009/06/23/republicans_in_the_wilderness?page=full

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FROM OTHER COLUMNS

"I doubt whether there are many Americans who think Congress has either the right or competency to choose where they live, what clothes they wear or what cars they drive. Yet many Americans stand ready to allow Congress to decide what doctors they go to and what treatments they receive. We forget that once we have government-sponsored health care, it can be used to justify almost any restraint on liberty."

-Walter E. Williams

"[T]he unifying constant of [Obama's] domestic policies -- their connecting thread -- is that they advance the Democrats' dependency agenda. The party of government aims to make Americans more equal by making them equally dependent on government for more and more things."

-George Will

"While doctrinaire socialists might feel betrayed by liberalism's cozy embrace of big business, their betrayal pales in comparison to the bitterness of free-marketers who defend big business's freedom to operate, only to see these businesses use that freedom to hide behind the skirts of the nanny state. Real freedom means the freedom to fail as well as succeed. Big business wants to be protected from the former and deny competitors the latter. And their betrayal, more than anything, disheartens those who would defend both freedoms."

-Jonah Goldberg

"We can debate endlessly whether the Constitution authorizes any president to 'overhaul' the financial system. But I want to focus on a different matter: whether any president, with all his advisers, is capable of overseeing something as complex as the financial system. My answer is no, and it is ominous that a bright guy like Obama doesn't know this. He thinks he must regulate the system because it is so complicated and important. In fact, those are the reasons why he cannot regulate it, and should not try."

-John Stossel

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LEFTIST WATCH

Large Democratic Party donors have shut down a July 4^th tea party in Atlanta.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/06/july_4_atlanta_tea_party_cance.html

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. has backed off his plan to investigate purported wrongdoing by the liberal activist group ACORN, saying ''powers that be' put the kibosh on the idea.”

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/26/conyers-backs-off-probe-of-acorn-practices/?feat=home_headlines

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NEWS FROM THE ISLAMIC WORLD

If it were in a position to do so, Al Qaeda would use Pakistan's nuclear weapons in its fight against the United States, a top leader of the group said.

http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-40495320090621?sp=true

From Iran: “…upon learning of his son's death, the elder Mr. Alipour was told the family had to pay an equivalent of $3,000 as a "bullet fee"—a fee for the bullet used by security forces—before taking the body back..”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124571865270639351.html

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BOOKS

“The Conservative's Handbook: Defining the Right Position on Issues from A to Z” by Phil Valentine. “Phil gets straight to the point on the issues, but provides an outstanding comprehensive detailed analysis. Entertaining, thought provoking, and meticulous with every page proves that Phil Valentine is an outstanding author.”

http://www.amazon.com/Conservatives-Handbook-Defining-Position-Issues/dp/1581826621/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246056188&sr=8-1

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GLOBALONEY

The Environmental Protection Agency is suppressing an internal study that undermines the administration's position on global warming. The author of the study has been warned that “ your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision....I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office."

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Perspectives/Default.aspx?id=582102

The cat is out of the bag: On Friday the Competitive Enterprise Institute got their hands on the report.

http://cei.org/cei_files/fm/active/0/DOC062509-004.pdf

They never have and they never will. The house of cards that is the science behind "climate change" is collapsing at exactly the same time it is being imposed by the Obama administration and Congress as an ideological "truth." America is facing the perfect storm of an imploding scientific theory that will be enforced by the rule of law.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/after_global_warming.html

The Spanish professor is puzzled. Why, Gabriel Calzada wonders, is the U.S. president recommending that America emulate the Spanish model for creating "green jobs" in "alternative energy" even though Spain's unemployment rate is 18.1 percent -- more than double the European Union average -- partly because of spending on such jobs? Calzada, (snip)has produced a report which, if true, is inconvenient for the Obama administration's green agenda,

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/06/25/tilting_at_green_windmills_97168.html

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ARTICLES

Ward Connerly, former University of California Regent, has an article that should raise any decent American's level of disgust for what's routinely practiced at most of our universities. Connerly tells of a conversation he had with a high-ranking UC administrator about a proposal that the administrator was developing to increase campus diversity. Connerly asked the administrator why he considered it important to tinker with admissions instead of just letting the chips fall where they may. His response was that that unless the university took steps to "guide" admissions decisions, the University of California campuses would be dominated by Asians. When Connerly asked, "What would be wrong with that?", the UC administrator told him that Asians are "too dull -- they study, study, study." Then he said to Connerly, "If you ever say I said this, I will have to deny it."

http://townhall.com/Columnists/WalterEWilliams/2009/06/24/vicious_academic_liberals?page=full

Five More Myths the Left Has Created About Itself

http://townhall.com/Columnists/JohnHawkins/2009/06/23/five_more_myths_the_left_has_created_about_itself?page=full

There has been much talk recently that the US is becoming more like Europe. To be more technically accurate, we should say that the US is becoming more like what Europe used to be. In the meantime, Europe is un-Europeanizing. We are about to make France look like a holdout for rugged individualism.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/hello_europe_goodbye_europe.html

Senate bill S.909 (House bill HR1913), would add gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity to the list of protected categories under current federal hate crimes laws…..We have become accustom to thinking of sexual orientation as pertaining to heterosexuality and homosexuality... But the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lists 30 sexual orientations. Therefore, since the term “sexual orientation” remains undefined in the hate crimes bill all 30 of these orientations as defined by the APA will become federally protected behaviors. Among the 30 orientations are: exhibitionism, incest, voyeurism, zoophilia/bestiality, and pedophilia. It is for this reason critics of the bill call it “The Pedophile Protection Act.”

http://www.thecypresstimes.com/article/Columnists/Terry_L_Brown/THE_SPIRIT_BEHIND_HATE_CRIMES_LAWS/23034

Michael Medved, “Why Should So Many Americans Feel Threatened by Business?”

http://townhall.com/Columnists/MichaelMedved/2009/06/24/why_should_so_many_americans_feel_threatened_by_business

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NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES

The US National Debt Clock:

http://www.usdebtclock.org/

North Korea's concentration camps reportedly contain over half a million citizens, and is possibly one of the worst cases of systematic human rights abuses occurring in the world today. Ahn Myong Chol, an ex-prison guard, describes the conditions of the inmates of Camp 22, in objective and chilling detail, like medical experiments being performed on entire families with poison gas.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecZKGN_0uHc

Reforming our universities

http://www.mindingthecampus.com/

New RNC ad on health care:

http://action.afa.net/Detail.aspx?id=2147485715

Images from Iran:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS2ijHpzEuQ

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HUMOR

Sarah Palin speaking to U.S. troops in Kosovo: "Then Sen. John Kerry makes this joke, I don't know if you saw this, but he makes this joke saying, 'Aw shoot, of all the governors in the nation who disappeared, too bad it couldn't have been that governor from Alaska…But the way he said it, he looked quite frustrated, and he looked so sad, and I just wanted to reach out to the TV and say, 'John Kerry, why the long face?'"

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WISE WORDS

"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery."

-Winston Churchill

"Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government."

-James Madison

"Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition."

-Thomas Jefferson

"Remember that every government service, every offer of government-financed security, is paid for in the loss of personal freedom. ... In the days to come, whenever a voice is raised telling you to let the government do it, analyze very carefully to see whether the suggested service is worth the personal freedom which you must forgo in return for such service."

-Ronald Reagan

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The Op-Ed Review is a compilation of the week’s news and opinions of interest to the conservative activist. I follow a variety of news sources and note what I think are the important events of the week that may be underreported in the mainstream media. I also read about 50 syndicated op-ed columns each week and reprint part of what I think is the best one. The goal is to help the reader be a more effective activist for the conservative cause. If you would like to receive this as an e-mail each weekend, click here to drop me a note. mailto:garyfoss3@comcast.net

Gary Foss

47th District Republicans

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