op ed review 11/8

THIS WEEK’S NEWS

Independents who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 broke big for Republicans on Tuesday as the GOP wrested political control from Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey, a troubling sign for the president and his party heading into an important midterm election year.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_election_rdp

“The Democrats did not lose a 2-1 squeaker last night. They lost two huge races, saw an overall evaporation of 25 basis points of support -- and lost by nearly 500,000 cumulative votes in the three high-profile elections. Or put another way, Republicans won two races decided by millions of voters -- and Democrats won a small race dominated by party operatives.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/forget_the_21_spin_it_was_a_ro.html

Gay-marriage opponents had 53 percent of the vote in a referendum that asked Maine voters whether they wanted to repeal a law allowing same-sex marriage that had passed the Legislature and was signed by the governor.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_gay_marriage_maine

Stunned and angry, national gay rights leaders Wednesday blamed ads — and President Obama's lack of engagement — for a bitter election setback in Maine that could alter the dynamics for both sides in the gay-marriage debate. Conservatives, in contrast, celebrated Maine voters' rejection of a law that would have allowed gay couples to wed.

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20091105/NEWS08/911050350/Gay+leaders+blame+TV+ads++Obama+for+loss+in+Maine

The only Democratic legislator in Eastern Washington lost his job Tuesday.

http://www.komonews.com/news/local/69037287.html

The health care bill headed for a vote in the House costs $1.2 trillion or more over a decade, according to numerous Democratic officials and figures contained in an analysis by congressional budget experts, far higher than the $900 billion cited by President Barack Obama as a price tag for his reform plan.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091102/ap_on_bi_ge/us_health_care_overhaul

The House Republican Conference circulated what it called a list of ''new boards, bureaucracies, commissions and programs' created in the House health care bill. House Republicans said Monday that the health care reform bill pushed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi would create a whopping 111 new ''federal bureaucracies.''

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/11/02/house-republicans-new-bureaucracies-health-care/

The gargantuan health care beast contains thirteen new tax hikes. Here they all are, with description and page number:

http://www.atr.org/userfiles/102909pr-housetaxhikes.pdf

Speaker Pelosi has reportedly told fellow Democrats that she's prepared to lose seats in 2010 if that's what it takes to pass ObamaCare.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703399204574505423751140690.html

Speaker Pelosi’s 2,032-page government takeover of health care contains a monthly abortion premium that will be charged to all enrollees in the government-run plan. It’s right there on line 16, page 96, section 213, under “Insurance Rating Rules.” The premium will be paid into a U.S. Treasury account - and these federal funds will be used to pay for the abortion services.

http://republicanleader.house.gov/blog/?p=666

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops dismissed the House Democrats’ plan to try to isolate funding for abortion in the health care bill as a “money-laundering system” that would do nothing to stop federal funding of abortion, an issue that could potentially derail health care reform.

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/56700

Jihad at Fort Hood: An Army psychiatrist opened fire on fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, TX. Soldiers who witnessed the rampage reported that the gunman shouted "Allahu Akbar!" — an Arabic phrase for "God is great!" — before opening fire.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091106/ap_on_re_us/us_fort_hood_shooting

Neither the CBS Evening News nor NBC Nightly News noted the Muslim religious beliefs of the mass killer.

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-baker/2009/11/05/cbs-nbc-fail-id-hasan-muslim-abcs-raddatz-relays-i-wish-his-name-was-sm

“Hmm. Can't imagine what Major Malik Nadal Hasan's motivation could have been”

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100015948/hmm-cant-imagine-what-major-malik-nadal-hasans-motivation-could-have-been/

NPR was also perplexed: “the motive behind the shootings was not immediately clear.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2009/11/06/jihad-at-fort-hood-by-robert-spencer/

Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Wash.) questions the motives of the nation’s largest senior citizens’ lobbying group. Reichert told CNSNews.com that it is possible AARP could benefit financially from the passage of the bill.

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/56710

A poll shows 59% of voters feel the nation has “gotten off on the wrong track.” The GOP leads the generic ballot test for both House and Senate by seven points (42-35 in both).

http://biggovernment.com/2009/11/02/exclusive-new-poll-finds-59-of-likely-voters-say-nation-is-on-the-wrong-track/

Thousands of Tea Party activists descended on the US Capitol building to protest the trillion dollar health care bill and government spending.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29183.html

Billed as a way for the government to put more fuel-efficient vehicles on highways, the popular $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program mostly involved swaps of old Ford or Chevrolet pickups for new ones that got only marginally better gas mileage, according to an analysis of new federal data by The Associated Press.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2010202089_apuscashforclunkers.html

More than 10,000 people turned out Monday night for a North Houston Tea Party

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6699950.html

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James T. Conway has emerged in internal Pentagon deliberations as the most outspoken opponent of permitting gay men and women to serve openly in the U.S. military. Most of the senior brass hold deep reservations about President Obama's pledge to end the ban on gays in the military.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/02/marine-leads-dont-ask-dont-tell-fight/

A San Francisco cosmetics company has ignited an outcry among pro-lifers for including an unexpected ingredient in its anti-aging creams: skin-cell proteins from an aborted fetus.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/03/aborted-fetus-cells-used-in-anti-aging-products/?source=newsletter_must-read-stories-today_top_stories

A new video of Jeremiah Wright has surfaced, showing Barack Obama's pastor of 20 years praising Marxism and discussing his ties to communists in El Salvador and Nicaragua and the Libyan government. Equally important, Wright is being introduced in the video by Robert W. McChesney, co-founder of Free Press, an organization which has come under scrutiny for its links to the Obama Administration

http://www.aim.org/aim-column/controversial-new-video-of-obamas-pastor/

Thank the patriot act: Another terror plot against Americans was foiled this past week, bringing the total number of attacks averted since September 11, 2001 to 27.

http://www.thebulletin.us/articles/2009/11/02/commentary/op-eds/doc4aed0a3a179aa892082712.txt

British film icon Sir Michael Caine has abandoned his support of the Labour party and announced he will vote Conservative at the next general election.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/6480576/Michael-Caine-switches-allegiance-to-Conservatives.html

NFL star Clint Didier, a resident of Connell, Washington and a first-time candidate for elected office, has formed an exploratory committee to consider a run against Sen. Patty Murray.

http://nwdigest.com/politics/11-01-2009/didier-planning-to-be-washington%E2%80%99s-conservative-us-senator/

Eleven more videos of young school children singing/speaking praises to President Obama. What seemed like an aberration now appears to be a troubling pattern. Each one of the videos below is creepier than the last.

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jjmnolte/2009/11/04/elementary-epidemic-11-uncovered-videos-show-school-children-performing-praises-to-obama/

______________________________________________________________________________________

THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN

Charles Krauthammer 11/6/09

Sure, Election Day 2009 will scare moderate Democrats and make passage of Obamacare more difficult. Sure, it makes it easier for resurgent Republicans to raise money and recruit candidates for 2010. But the most important effect of Tuesday's elections is historical. It demolishes the great realignment myth of 2008.

In the aftermath of last year's Obama sweep, we heard endlessly about its fundamental, revolutionary, transformational nature. How it was ushering in an FDR-like realignment for the 21st century in which new demographics -- most prominently, rising minorities and the young -- would bury the GOP far into the future. One book proclaimed "The Death of Conservatism," while the more modest merely predicted the terminal decline of the Republican Party into a regional party of the Deep South or a rump party of marginalized angry white men.

This was all ridiculous from the beginning. The '08 election was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And still he won by only seven points.

Exactly a year later comes the empirical validation of that skepticism. Virginia -- presumed harbinger of the new realignment, having gone Democratic in '08 for the first time in 44 years -- went red again. With a vengeance. Barack Obama had carried it by six points. The Republican gubernatorial candidate won by 17 -- a 23-point swing. New Jersey went from plus-15 Democratic in 2008 to minus-four in 2009. A 19-point swing.

What happened? The vaunted Obama realignment vanished. In 2009 in Virginia, the black vote was down by 20 percent; the under-30 vote by 50 percent. And as for independents, the ultimate prize of any realignment, they bolted. In both Virginia and New Jersey they'd gone narrowly for Obama in '08. This year they went Republican by a staggering 33 points in Virginia and by an equally shocking 30 points in New Jersey.

White House apologists will say the Virginia Democrat was weak. If the difference between Bob McDonnell and Creigh Deeds was so great, how come when the same two men ran against each other statewide for attorney general four years ago the race was a virtual dead heat? Which made the '09 McDonnell-Deeds rematch the closest you get in politics to a laboratory experiment for measuring the change in external conditions. Run them against each other again when it's Obamaism in action and see what happens. What happened was a Republican landslide.

The Obama coattails of 2008 are gone. The expansion of the electorate, the excitement of the young, came in uniquely propitious Democratic circumstances and amid unparalleled enthusiasm for electing the first African American president.

November '08 was one shot, one time, never to be replicated. Nor was November '09 a realignment. It was a return to the norm -- and definitive confirmation that 2008 was one of the great flukes in American political history.

The irony of 2009 is that the anti-Democratic tide overshot the norm -- deeply blue New Jersey, for example, elected a Republican governor for the first time in 12 years -- because Democrats so thoroughly misread 2008 and the mandate they assumed it bestowed. Obama saw himself as anointed by a watershed victory to remake American life. Not letting the cup pass from his lips, he declared to Congress only five weeks after his swearing-in his "New Foundation" for America -- from remaking the one-sixth of the American economy that is health care to massive government regulation of the economic lifeblood that is energy.

Moreover, the same conventional wisdom that proclaimed the dawning of a new age last November dismissed the inevitable popular reaction to Obama's hubristic expansion of government, taxation, spending and debt -- the tea party demonstrators, the town hall protesters -- as a raging rabble of resentful reactionaries, AstroTurf-phony and Fox News-deranged.

Some rump. Just last month Gallup found that conservatives outnumber liberals by 2 to 1 (40 percent to 20 percent) and even outnumber moderates (at 36 percent). So on Tuesday, the "rump" rebelled. It's the natural reaction of a center-right country to a governing party seeking to rush through a left-wing agenda using temporary majorities created by the one-shot election of 2008. The misreading of that election -- and of the mandate it allegedly bestowed -- is the fundamental cause of the Democratic debacle of 2009.

Edited from a longer column, read it here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/05/AR2009110504334.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

___________________________________________________________________________________________

FROM OTHER COLUMNS

"Among the most pathetic letters and e-mails I receive are those from people who ask why I don't write more 'positively' about Obama or 'give him the benefit of the doubt.' No one -- not even the President of the United States -- has an entitlement to a 'positive' response to his actions. The entitlement mentality has eroded the once common belief that you earned things, including respect, instead of being given them. As for the benefit of the doubt, no one -- especially not the President of the United States -- is entitled to that, when his actions can jeopardize the rights of 300 million Americans domestically and the security of the nation in an international jungle, where nuclear weapons may soon be in the hands of people with suicidal fanaticism. Will it take a mushroom cloud over an American city to make that clear? Was 9/11 not enough?"

-Thomas Sowell

"This is not about insuring the uninsured. This is not about health care. This is about stealing one-sixth of the U.S. private sector and putting it under the control of the federal government. And when they get this health care bill, if they do, that's the easiest, fastest way for them to be able to regulate every aspect of human behavior, because it will all have some related cost to health care -- what you drive, what you eat, where you live, what you do. And there'll be penalties for violating regulations. It's going to be the biggest snatch of freedom and liberty that has yet occurred in this country."

-Rush Limbaugh

"I think it behooves us to come up with ways to make politics a less attractive option. The one notion that popped into my head was to take a leaf out of the Aztec playbook and initiate human sacrifices. Would any of us really have strong objections to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer, Arlen Spector, Susan Collins, Henry Waxman, Charles Schumer, Olympia Snowe, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, being offered up to pacify the angry spirits of the Founding Fathers?"

-Burt Prelutsky

__________________________________________________________________________________________

GLOBALONEY

Al Gore is poised to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire,” profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/business/energy-environment/03gore.html

Al Gore is on the cover of November's The Costco Connection, the "lifestyle magazine for Costco members." It's hard to figure who looks worse in this odd coupling--the global-warming guru or the supersize warehouse store, which would not be a retail powerhouse were it not for the family minivan or SUV.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/166nguec.asp

In 2000 Al Gore’s lavish mansion gobbles up almost a $150,000 dollars a year in electric utilities alone, and that of course is before property taxes and all the other costs of owning a home in Belle Meade, which has one of the region’s highest costs of living.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/16552

_________________________________________________________________________________________

LEFTIST WATCH

Democratic civil war update: MoveOn raises $3.6 million to attack party moderates, i.e. those who don’t support Obamacare.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Democratic-civil-war-update-MoveOn-raises-36-million-to-attack-party-moderates-69360167.html

No sooner had we celebrated the exit of Barack Obama's green jobs czar, Van Jones, because of his Communist connections, another off-the-wall administration embarrassment surfaced. President Obama nominated for commissioner of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) a woman who signed a radical manifesto endorsing polygamy. We thought our nation had settled the polygamy issue a century and a half ago,

http://townhall.com/columnists/PhyllisSchlafly/2009/11/03/obama_makes_polygamy_a_21st-century_issue?page=full&comments=true

Having purchased, rented, or placed a down payment on all the political influence up for sale in America, leftist troublemaker George Soros now plans to ramp up his war on markets worldwide by creating an "Institute for New Economic Thinking" (INET).

http://spectator.org/archives/2009/11/04/killing-capitalism-soros-style

_____________________________________________________________________________________

ARTICLES

By any measure, the United States of America is a great nation. Thirteen colonies are now 50 states covering a vast continent and beyond. The U.S. economy accounts for almost a quarter of the total gross domestic product of all the countries in the world. The strongest military force on Earth allows the United States to extend its power anywhere…And yet it seems we are on a course of self-destruction…

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjI2MTg3MDNkMzdlZDM2YjNiMWE2MWJkNTUwMjhmZDc=

Leadership: What are we to make of a White House visitors list that includes 22 swiftly scheduled appointments with a union boss at a time when Gen. Stanley McChrystal can't get face time with the commander in chief?

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=511113

Ten races that have democrats worried for 2010.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1934715,00.html

"Tea party" activists say Tuesday's elections show that the Republican Party needs conservatives for victory, but the results suggest solidarity is more important: unified Republicans steamrolled in Virginia, while they fractured in New York and lost a House seat that they had held for more than a century.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/05/need-for-republican-unity-seen-as-election-lesson/?source=newsletter_must-read-stories-today_headlines

Service.gov And Its Soviet Similarities By SVETLANA KUNIN

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=510876

Think about this: Annual Medicare Fraud:$60 Billion; Annual Profits of Top Ten Insurance Companies:$8 billion

http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/10/post_145.asp

Heritage’s Robert Rector has written a new report on welfare: “Obama to Spend $10.3 Trillion on Welfare: Uncovering the Full Cost of Means-Tested Welfare or Aid to the Poor”

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/sr0067.cfm

Phyllis Schlafly summarizes:

http://townhall.com/columnists/PhyllisSchlafly/2009/09/22/obamas_plan_to_spread_the_wealth

__________________________________________________________________________________________

NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES

White House visitor logs. Looks like Bill Ayers has been to the White House twice, George Soros four times, and Michael Moore eight times. General McChrystal is still waiting for his meeting.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/disclosures/visitor-records

Google music search:

http://www.google.com/landing/music/

James Cagney and Bob Hope: “How’s that for an old man?”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOoNOs8Ql28

___________________________________________________________________________________________

WISE WORDS

"The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits."

-Plutarch

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction."

-Albert Einstein

"Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote that he is not making a present or a compliment to please an individual -- or at least that he ought not so to do; but that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country."

-Samuel Adams