op ed review 10/31
-Tony Blankley, former Reagan speechwriter
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
The Hill 2010 Midterm Election poll, surveying nearly 17,000 likely voters in 42 toss-up districts over four weeks, points to a massive Republican wave that, barring an extraordinary turnaround, will deliver crushing nationwide defeats for President Obama’s party.
http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/251115/hill-unveils-one-last-brutal-round-house-polls
A Rasmussen survey found 65 percent of likely voters would prefer to fire every member of Congress and start from scratch. 82 percent of Republicans and 78 percent of independents told the pollsters they wanted to give everyone on Capitol Hill the heave-ho.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/just_clean_out_crapitol_hill_1QdQPzvRp6gCFbrwRUZvGO
Dino Rossi has come back and now leads Sen. Patty Murray by one percent.
http://www.lifenews.com/2010/10/28/state-5619/
Rand Paul has opened a 53 to 40 percent lead over Democrat Jack Conway in the Senate race.. PPP is now calling Paul the "likely victor" in the race and says the reason is the backlash from Conway's campaign ad saying that Paul, during his college days, worshipped a false god named "Aqua Buddha."
Sharron Angle is edging ahead of Harry Reid in the polls, which shouldn't be a surprise after she trounced him in their only debate last week.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/10/027530.php
The Sharron Angle campaign had a banner day fundraising after The View co-host Joy Behar said of Angle on national television, “She’s going to hell, this b***h!” After the vicious remarks, the Angle campaign sent a flower arrangement with a note enclosed. “Joy, Raised $150,000 online yesterday. Thanks for your help. Sincerely, Sharron Angle”
A voter in North Carolina says he pushed the button to vote Republican in all races, but the voting machine screen displayed a ballot with all Democrats checked. He cleared the screen and tried again with the same result, he said.
http://www.newbernsj.com/articles/machine-91656-screen-voter.html
The Minnesota Democrat Central Committee has now targeted Catholic clergy. A postcard was sent out to voters with a photo shopped picture of a Catholic priest wearing a campaign button saying: "Ignore the Poor."
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/10/mn_democrats_declare_war_on_ca.html
The National Football League’s PAC is contributing heavily to incumbent democrats - $10,000 to Harry Reid, $5,000 to Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas; $5,000 to Russ Feingold of Wisconsin; $5,000 to Barbara Boxer of California; and $5,000 to Patty Murray of Washington. In none of these races did the NFL’s PAC contribute to the Republican challenger. Of the $341,000 the NFL’s PAC has contributed to congressional candidates in this election cycle, $340,000 has gone to incumbents.
Clint Eastwood told Katie Couric he is "not a fan" of the current president. http://dailynews.muzi.com/news/ll/english/10104071.shtml
A union official openly boasted, “We don’t like to brag,” but “we’re the big dog” when it comes to campaign funding. Big as in $87.5 million. Big as in the biggest spender of any outside group—all meant to protect the interests of unions, the new “privileged class.”
The latest figures show that the Democratic Party machinery has outraised its Republican counterpart in this campaign cycle by almost $270 million. And even when outside spending on television advertising and direct mail is added to the mix, Republicans still haven’t closed the gap. The money race totals come to $856 million for the Democratic committees and their aligned outside groups, compared to $677 for their Republican adversaries.
Amid growing dissatisfaction with federal employees, a group of younger, web-savvy feds are planning a "Government Doesn't Suck March"
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/10/government_doesnt_suck_march_p.html
Taxpayers in Massachusetts coughed up a staggering $35.7 million this year in free emergency health care for more than 52,000 illegal aliens, sparking outrage from candidates and critics who back a tougher line on immigration.
The Environmental Protection Agency is looking to hire an environmental protection specialist who will help the agency accomplish its “environmental justice goals." The job pays up to $84,146 a year, and "You do not need a degree to qualify for this position."
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/epa-looking-hire-environmental-justice-c
New York City residents who want to own a gun may soon be denied permits if they are litterbugs, if they are bad drivers, or if they have fallen behind on a few bills.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/10/23/nyc-proposal-renders-bad-drivers-debtors-unfit-guns/
A Chinese scientific research center has built the fastest supercomputer ever made, replacing the United States as maker of the swiftest machine, and giving China bragging rights as a technology superpower.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/39886462
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THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Michael Goodwin 10/25
Why the US Is Turning to the Right
A Conservative friend wise about human nature and politics summarizes his views this way: "Liberals don't think they have any politics. They think they are in a state of nature. Only those who disagree with them are unnatural." It's a brilliant insight, and tells you all you need to know about the culture and political wars in America today. Less than two years after the arc of history seemed to favor them, the high priests of liberal orthodoxy are on the run. They have overreached, and now they must pay.
But they are not going quietly or with decency. They are desperate and dangerous, astonishingly reckless in their attacks on the majority of Americans who commit the secular sin of disagreement. Faced with massive public resistance to their demands for conformity, President Obama and his religious-like acolytes have given up trying to persuade skeptics. They are reduced to trying to crush dissent. To them, resistance is heresy, and must be eliminated.
They are not embarrassed by the obvious double standards they are embracing or the false claims they are peddling. They are, as my friend observed, incapable of recognizing as legitimate any view but their own, so the end justifies the means.
Obama's scurrilous conduct is Exhibit A of the panic on the left. Discarding the sunny-side-up mask, he crisscrosses the country in fear-monger mode. His base appeals to women, blacks, Latinos and students are identity-group politics at its worst. He is not alone in having a worldview that depends on absolute conformity. Deviation is also dangerous to the institutions that form the backbone of the liberal establishment he leads.
The Juan Williams case says it all. Claims by the goon squad at NPR that he was fired for "expressing a personal opinion on a divisive issue" are transparent hogwash. He and other NPR analysts and correspondents routinely express opinions that favor Democrats. He was fired because he expressed an inconvenient opinion -- that he and many Americans often associate Muslims with terrorists. And he did it on Fox News, the antichrist to the church of the left.
His fears are widely shared but don't fit with NPR's authorized view of the world. So it -- he -- must be silenced. In firing him, NPR instantly created another example of why the country is turning right. Tens of millions of ordinary people have been roused to fight for rights they assumed they had. From health-care mandates to rising federal debt to confiscatory taxes to suffocating speech codes, they have correctly concluded their liberty is under assault.
To be sure, dissenters do not have a monopoly on wisdom or common sense. A partisan label is never a guarantee of righteousness, as the reversal of political fortunes in two years demonstrates. Rather, the American system, we learn again, is intolerant of only one thing: intolerance. Whether its hammer comes from left or right, it always wakes the spirit of revolution. Freedom of speech, to dissent, to oppose, to fight back, is not just the literal content of the First Amendment. It is the essence of who we are as a people.
Obama, of course, infamously discounted American Exceptionalism when he was asked about it, suggesting he does not view our national character as unique. His mistake. Still, we should be grateful. Just as Obama's election was the result of George W. Bush's failures, the awakening of the American majority wouldn't have happened without Obama's overreach. Because he did, the right to say no -- hell, no! -- will soon be secured anew. Hold on for nine more days.
Another good read from former Reagan speechwriter, Peggy Noonan “Two central facts give shape to the historic 2010 election. The first is not understood by Republicans, and the second not admitted by Democrats. The first: the tea party is not a "threat" to the Republican Party, the tea party saved the Republican Party. In a broad sense, the tea party rescued it from being the fat, unhappy, querulous creature it had become, a party that didn't remember anymore why it existed, or what its historical purpose was. The tea party, with its energy and earnestness, restored the GOP to itself..... The second fact of 2010 is understood by Republicans but not admitted by Democrats….This election is about one man, Barack Obama, who fairly or not represents the following: the status quo, Washington, leftism, Nancy Pelosi, Fannie and Freddie, and deficits in trillions, not billions. Everyone who votes is going to be pretty much voting yay or nay on all of that. And nothing can change that story line now.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304023804575566503565327356.html
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FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“Opening a whole new branch of cognitive science -- liberal psychology -- Obama has discovered a new principle: The fearful brain is hard-wired to act befuddled, i.e., vote Republican. But of course. Here Obama has spent two years bestowing upon the peasantry the 'New Foundation' of a more regulated, socially engineered and therefore more humane society, and they repay him with recalcitrance and outright opposition. Here he gave them Obamacare, the stimulus, financial regulation and a shot at cap-and-trade -- and the electorate remains not just unmoved but ungrateful. Faced with this truly puzzling conundrum, Dr. Obama diagnoses a heretofore undiscovered psychological derangement: anxiety-induced Obama Underappreciation Syndrome, wherein an entire population is so addled by its economic anxieties as to be neurologically incapable of appreciating the 'facts and science' undergirding Obamacare and the other blessings their president has bestowed upon them from on high."
-Charles Krauthammer
"Fundamentally, there is a permanent war of attrition between liberty and the federal regulatory bureaucrats. A war of attrition is a resource war…... Although I don't believe it has ever been tried, a new Congress could try to use its power of the purse to begin to 'atrit' the regulators. That is to suggest Congress should order permanent, immediate and massive staff reductions among the regulators. Defund and de-authorize (say 50 percent) of the regulatory staff positions.
-Tony Blankley
"NPR should be defunded, not because it's liberal but because it's wrong for the federal government to be in the news business or to subsidize one set of views over another."
-Jonah Goldberg
(Sign the petition here to defund NPR)
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BOOKS, FILM
“Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism” by Stanley Kurtz. “When I began my post-campaign research for this book, my inclination was to downplay or dismiss evidence of explicit socialism in Obama’s background. I thought the socialism issue was an unprovable and unnecessary distraction from the broader question of Obama’s ultra-liberal inclinations. I was wrong. Evidence that suggests Obama is a socialist, I am now convinced, is real, important, and profoundly relevant to the present.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/251245/radical-white-house-interview
"Beyond a House Divided: The Moral Consensus Ignored by Washington, Wall Street and the Media" by the leader of the Knights of Columbus, Carl Anderson. How recent polling conclusively reveals that the culture wars are being won by those with traditional values. Those of us who believe in God, have successful marriages, oppose abortions in most instances, want less government than more, think the government and media are part of the problem, and are supportive of religion in the public square are not a minority. We're not just a majority either. We are part of the quiet consensus at work in this country — if only those in the media and Washington, D.C., were paying attention. The truth is that Americans are a people guided and sustained by morality and faith, and want those values reflected both in their institutions and political leadership.
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LEFTIST WATCH
If you thought liberals stopped admiring President Barack Obama as the Messiah, think again. Herb Johnson, secretary-treasurer of the Missouri AFL-CIO: "Sometimes you have to remind people that, `Hey, Jesus Christ couldn't do anything more than President Obama has on the agenda we supported two years ago….”
Important article: The CEO of National Public Radio wants to create a national network to ensure that in the future, you get your news from the government in general and NPR in particular. “…a declaration of war by one of the most powerful women in journalism against for-profit, non-liberal media. If Schiller and her liberal friends have their way, Fox and its viewers will pay the bill for her new government news network.” To stop Schiller now, Republicans would have to defund PBS and CPB as well to have any hope of torpedoing her plans to build a nationwide news delivery system in the style of the BBC, but on steroids.
Newsletters published by the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America show President Barack Obama actively participated in a 1996 rally co-sponsored by the group and held at The University of Chicago during his first campaign for the Illinois state Senate.
http://biggovernment.com/jrossomando/2010/10/23/obama-campaigned-before-socialist-group-in-96/
George Soros endorsed the California marijuana legalization initiative and plans to make a major financial contribution to the campaign.
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ISLAM
A 32 year old Saudi woman was jailed for six months for disobeying her father.
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=42193
More and more people are getting their hands chopped off in Iran. In the last few months, seven have had a hand amputated by the state to serve as an “example” for others.
http://www.asianews.it/news-en/More-hands-amputated-in-Iran-19839.html
One quarter of Muslims who completed an online survey believe that polygamy is legal with Islam and that all Muslims have the right to practice polygamy if they choose.
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=42201
Americans have now risen to the very top of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network. With their innate knowledge of the country’s psyche and the ease with which they can travel the country without being detected, the U.S. passport-carrying terrorists have become a nightmare for counter-intelligence agents
A senior al-Qaida leader calls for Muslims living in the metro Detroit area to commit jihadist attacks inside the U.S.
http://www.freep.com/article/20101023/NEWS05/101023038/Video-urges-Detroit-area-Muslims-to-attack
The sister in law of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has converted to Islam.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Flash.aspx/196445
Statisticians have predicted that there will be more Muslims in Britain’s mosques on Fridays than Anglicans in church on Sundays within a decade.
Mohammed is now the most popular name for baby boys in the UK, ahead of Jack and Harry.
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ACTIVISM
Election Day approaches; what can you do now to aid the conservative cause? Call four conservative friends or acquaintances and make sure they voted. If they haven’t, remind them what’s at stake. Ask them to each call four more conservative friends…..(yes, we’re getting tired of the all the phone calls, but they’re necessary to root out forgetful voters.)
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GLOBALONEY
Al Gore gave a speech in Sweden recently. The guests were advised to use any form of public transportation to go to the event, in order to minimize CO2 emissions. Gore left his car idling for one hour during speech; and then opted for a Swedish government jet to take him to his next engagement.
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ARTICLES
PJ O’Rourke: “This is not an election on November 2. This is a restraining order. Power has been trapped, abused and exploited by Democrats. Go to the ballot box and put an end to this abusive relationship. And let’s not hear any nonsense about letting the Democrats off if they promise to get counseling.”
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/they-hate-our-guts_511739.html
March of the Mama Grizzlies: The glamorous, gun-crazy women with big game in their sights on November 2
Michelle Malkin: “Standing Tall: The Rise and Resilience of Conservative Women”
http://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/article/standing-tall-rise-and-resilience-conser
“60 Minutes” provided an in-depth report on the realities of the unemployment situation in America today. When you take into account the underemployed as well as the unemployed, the national rate hits 17% and California a staggering 22%.”
Shelby Steele: But Barack Obama is not an "other" so much as he is a child of the 1960s. His coming of age paralleled exactly the unfolding of a new "counterculture" American identity. And this new American identity—and the post-1960s liberalism it spawned—is grounded in a remarkable irony: bad faith in America as virtue itself, bad faith in the classic American identity of constitutional freedom and capitalism as the way to a better America….He is simply the first president we have seen grounded in this counterculture American identity. When he bows to foreign leaders, he is not displaying "otherness" but the counterculture Americanism of honorable self-effacement in which America acknowledges its own capacity for evil as prelude to engagement…..Among today's liberal elite, bad faith in America is a sophistication, a kind of hipness. More importantly, it is the perfect formula for political and governmental power. It rationalizes power in the name of intervening against evil—I will use the government to intervene against the evil tendencies of American life (economic inequality, structural racism and sexism, corporate greed, neglect of the environment and so on), so I need your vote.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304173704575578363243019000.html
Top 10 reasons Obamacare is unraveling
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NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
Watch this before voting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLlF5YMf7Yc
Here’s the John Carlson voter’s guide:
http://www.komonews.com/opinion/commentators/33703309.html
Just what it says:
http://www.christianvoterguide.com/
Another way to complete your ballot is to take a “progressive” voters guide and vote the other way on everything:
http://progressivevotersguide.com/2010/washington/general/?src=primary
Send a report about voter fraud, intimidation, or other irregular election activity via your iPhone or iPod with this ap. You will have the option to send photos or video.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ireport2010/id398437175?mt=8
Electionjournal.org is an online community dedicated to raising public awareness of vote fraud and election irregularities. If an election is worth winning, then there is someone willing to steal it.
http://www.electionjournal.org/test-parent-page/
“Top U.S. Brands Favored Much Higher Among One Political Party or the Other, Survey Finds”
http://adage.com/article?article_id=146663
The Best and Worst Campaigns Ads of 2010 Elections
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=39575
Three charts.
Some unbelievable footage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwywo9y-_qE&feature=player_embedded
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WISE WORDS
"We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth. Our government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed."
-Ronald Reagan
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