op ed review 10/17
Democrats have canceled all of their ad reservations in at least six districts where their odds of holding the seats appear to be shrinking with three weeks to go until Election Day.
GOP leads Democrats by 17 points among men.
85 percent of Americans are either angry about the economy or at least dissatisfied with it, according to the survey produced for ABC and Yahoo!.
Sharron Angle has raised an eye-popping $14 million between July 1 and Sept. 30 for her challenge to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a stunning number that far eclipses the cash-collection totals of other prominent candidates seeking Senate seats next month.
And she won the debate with Sen. Reid on Wednesday, telling the Democrat to “man up” at one point and questioning how he got wealthy during his years in Congress.
A new Rasmussen poll shows Ms. Angle winning the race by four points, her biggest lead since June. Two other polls from CNN and Fox News also confirm a recent jump in her standing.
In Illinois, Republican state Sen. Bill Brady holds a lead of nine percentage points over Democratic Gov. Quinn in the race for governor, according to a new poll that also finds the Illinois Senate race deadlocked.
The White House intensified its attacks on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for its alleged ties to foreign donors, part of an escalating Democratic effort to link Republicans with corporate and overseas interests. The chamber adamantly denies that foreign funds are used in its U.S. election efforts. President Obama, speaking at a rally in Philadelphia, said "the American people deserve to know who is trying to sway their elections".
John Hindraker: “Obama's lies are particularly reprehensible, given that his 2008 Presidential campaign represents the gold standard for accepting contributions illegally from foreign sources, with no disclosure whatsoever….. Every time you think the Democratic Party can't sink any lower, it does.”
Karl Rove: "Have these people no shame? Does the president of the United States have such little regard for the office that he holds that he goes out there and makes these kind of baseless charges against his political enemies?......This is just beyond the pale. How dare the president do this…"
Charles Krauthammer: “Well, there's desperation and then there's reptilian desperation. And this is the reptilian variety. This thing just oozes of slime…”
For those who’ve forgotten, here’s the 2008 headline: “Obama Accepting Untraceable Donations”
A federal appeals court reversed course and upheld Washington State’s ban on voting by prison inmates in a case that challenged the ban on the grounds that it had a disproportionate effect on minority voters.
ABC News asks, “In South Dakota: Another Sarah Palin?.......She's a rancher, a mother of three, and a staunch conservative who is running on a platform of slashing federal spending and repealing the new federal health care law. She's also an avid hunter known to hunt elk with a bow and arrow. Her political views and physical appearance have led some to label her "South Dakota's Sarah Palin."
Paul Allen has donated $100,000 to the Defeat 1098 campaign to turn back the Washington State income tax Initiative.
The day after he (or a member of his staff) is caught on tape calling his Republican opponent Meg Whitman a whore, Jerry Brown announced the endorsement of the National Organization of Women (NOW). It's fashionable in feminist circles to sit around bemoaning the fact that few young women want to identify themselves as feminists. Wanna know why?
President Obama is coming to Seattle next week to headline a get-out-the-vote rally for U.S. Sen. Patty Murray.
More than half of the net new jobs in the entire U.S. during the past 12 months were created in Texas.
The U.S. government had another fabulous year—in spending your money. “We didn't expect President Obama to hold a press conference, but why are Republicans so quiet? Spending rolled in for the year that ended September 30 at $3.45 trillion, second only to 2009's $3.52 trillion in the record books.”
States appropriated almost $6.2 billion for four-year colleges and universities between 2003 and 2008 to help pay for the education of students who did not return for year two. In addition, the federal government spent $1.5 billion and states spent $1.4 billion on grants for students who didn't start their sophomore years,
Even though America is fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, members of President Obama's Cabinet are three times more likely to have attended law school than boot camp. Only two - Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki - among the 16 Cabinet and six Cabinet-rank officials are military veterans.
Congressional staffers are allowed to use information about policies about to be implemented to invest in stocks and make money. At least 72 aides on both sides of the aisle traded shares of companies that their bosses help oversee.
It’s being called by some, Seattle’s war on cars. A series of recent moves by city leaders has critics saying Seattle wants to balance its massive budget deficit on the backs of motorists.
In the final days of her most difficult reelection bid, California Senator Barbara Boxer is emphasizing veterans issues to deflect criticism of her long history of undermining the US military, a cynical strategy that has garnered an endorsement “from the increasingly leftist VFW.”
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THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Investor’s Business Daily 10/12
The attack on the Chamber follows community organizer Saul Alinsky's dictum to "pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." It follows earlier offensives that began in this vein, first with Obama operatives taking aim at conservative media, including Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. That was followed by attacks on former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and the grass-roots Tea Party movement, which seeks smaller government. After that, Koch Industries, whose two owners help fund free-market think tanks such as the Cato Institute, was in Obama's sights, accused of evading taxes — which the White House now says it has no direct knowledge of.
Finally, we have the full frontal assault on the Chamber, representing 300,000 American businesses. None of these entities are actual political opponents, and they aren't even treated as politicians. With the president hurling false charges at major pillars of what is essentially civil society, these targets are treated as enemies. Is this what we've come to? A presidential enemies list, Alinskyite tactics targeting individuals one by one and, in this attack on the Chamber, a propaganda war against the private sector?
It's hard to see how Team Obama can win by harassing the entire domestic private sector, and even harder to see why it should try. Obama's top political problem is joblessness, and it's the Chamber's members that are the job creators. If the president can't find a way of accommodating them, he's in for political trouble. At a bare minimum, Obama can start by ending the war against the Chamber's exercise of free speech and restore his stature as the leader of the free world — instead of acting like some kind of pale imitation of a Latin American dictator……His charges are false and he knows it. If this isn't beneath his office, what is?
One needs to look hard to find any head of a major democracy as openly at war with his country's Chamber of Commerce as Obama is. His charge that the Chamber's $75 million ad campaign ahead of elections is funded by foreign sources is both false and an unprecedented smear, an accusation of a crime. It's deeply disappointing coming from a country's elected leader.
Neither Europe's socialists nor Asia's combative leadership fight their chambers like this. Chambers of commerce, including the U.S. branch, generally seek pragmatic accommodation with those in power. Obama's attack on the Chamber is sadly reminiscent of the scorched-earth relations Venezuela's self-declared communist leader Hugo Chavez has with his country's business groups — and he makes no secret of wanting to destroy them.
Shockingly, a similarly antagonistic situation now exists in the U.S., center of world capitalism.
Based on a blog post from the Center for American Progress, Obama now calls the Chamber's ad campaign in defense of free markets not protected speech but "a threat to democracy." His embattled party still repeats the scurrilous claim that the Chamber's ads are foreign-funded because it receives a small amount of dues from overseas companies. But nearly all of these businesses are based in the U.S., and their dues are separated from ad funds. The White House knows this — or at least, should.
As the media, including the New York Times, gave this a good debunking, Obama refrained from continuing his charges Monday. But his lieutenant, Vice President Joe Biden, "didn't get the memo," as Lucianne Goldberg quipped on her Web site. So Biden continues the dishonest line of attack. "I challenge the Chamber of Commerce to tell us how much of the money they're investing is from foreign sources," Biden said Monday.
"Not a red cent," the Chamber replied, desperate to keep the lies from becoming a "truth" by repetition.
"These accusations by a George Soros-funded anti-business blog are unfounded, deceitful, and completely erroneous," the Chamber wrote on its Web site. "They are a desperate attempt to silence those who support free enterprise, and a diversion by people upset by their grim prospects in the coming election."
This sorry situation says two things about the Obama administration: One, it's willing to use the same Alinskyite tactics against a single target that it used to win elections. And two, it's at war with America's private sector.
Another “must read” this week: “Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the UCSB. Here is his letter of resignation to the President of the American Physical Society(APS). “…..and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society. It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare…. I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.”
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FROM OTHER COLUMNS
"Here is a quick summary of President Obama's recent debate with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Chamber of Commerce: The Democrats' economic policies have failed. Obama: Look out! Foreigners!"
-Jacob Sullum
"There's an irony to occupying the Oval Office. When presidents think they're bigger than the job they hold, they shrink in office. When they think they're smaller than the honor they've been temporarily bestowed, they grow into it. Obama has done nothing but shrink."
-Jonah Goldberg
"In Rolling Stone magazine, Obama berated members of his base for their lethargy and 'sitting on their hands complaining.' One leftist remarked, 'I've never seen a politician run an election with the message 'Don't be stupid, quit your bitching and vote for me.'"
-David Limbaugh
"The White House admitted that ninety thousand stimulus checks were sent out to dead people last year. It's worse than that. The dead are late in reporting whether they spent their stimulus money to install solar panels or to retain teachers."
-Argus Hamilton
"The week ended with 36 attendees at an Obama rally in Maryland collapsing in apparent illness. As one wag said it seems like just yesterday Obama crowds were swooning; now they are simply sickened."
-Clarice Feldman
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BOOKS, FILM
“The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It” by Angelo Codevilla. “….introduces readers to the Ruling Class, the group of bipartisan political elites who run America. This Ruling Class, educated at prestigious universities and convinced of its own superiority, has everything to gain by raising taxes and expanding the reach of government. This class maintains that it knows what is best and continually increases its power over every facet of American life, from family and marriage to the environment, guns, and God.”
“Rules for Radical Conservatives: Beating the Left at Its Own Game to Take Back America” by David Kahane
“This book is a witty and much-needed take on the tactics that many politicians use - and that we must understand and counteract if we are to be successful in changing our ways. It pains me to say this, but the message of this book is correct. Conservatives need to understand what Alinsky tactics are all about. Highly recommended.” says one reviewer.
"Trickle Up Poverty: Stopping Obama's Attack on Our Borders, Economy and Security," by Michael Savage. According to Mr. Savage, the president is a leftist adolescent, a narcissist whose megalomania and grand designs threaten to destroy traditional America: "President Obama is like a destructive child who takes apart a priceless watch that was carefully passed down to him," he writes. "Without regard for the value of what he holds, he recklessly scatters the pieces on the floor and then can't put them back together again."
Ted Nugent: “If Dirty Harry wrote books instead of blowing away bad guys, he would have written "Trickle Up Poverty." Thankfully, Michael Savage wrote it instead.”
“The film opens and closes with a quote from the Book of Job, and at a key moment the gospel hymn "Oh Happy Day" serenades the audience. It is, the makers say, the ultimate feelgood movie - about the miracle of life itself. The movie in question is Secretariat, the true life story of an American thoroughbred race horse that won the Triple Crown in 1973, and it is the latest attempt by Hollywood to recruit cinema-goers from the Bible Belt.”
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LEFTIST WATCH
George Soros, a champion of liberal causes, has been directing his money to groups that work on health care and the environment, rather than electoral politics. Asked if the prospect of Republican control of one or both houses of Congress concerned him, he said: “….I’m not in a position to stop it. I don’t believe in standing in the way of an avalanche.”
In the afternoon of April 1, 1983, Barack Obama, then a senior at Columbia University, made his way into the Great Hall of Manhattan’s Cooper Union to attend a “Socialist Scholars Conference.” There Obama discovered his vocation as a community organizer, as well as a political program to guide him throughout his life. The conference itself was not a secret, but it held a secret, for it was there that a demoralized and frustrated socialist movement largely set aside strategies of nationalization and turned increasingly to local organizing as a way around the Reagan presidency — and its own spotty reputation.…..Obama attended the 1983 and 1984 Socialist Scholars conferences, and quite possibly the 1985 conclave as well. A detailed account of these conferences (along with many other events from Obama’s radical past) and the evidence for Obama’s attendance at them can be found in my new book, “Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism.” The 1983 Conference, billed as a tribute to Marx, was precisely when Obama discovered his vocation for community organizing. ….Obama’s connection to socialist ideologues didn’t end with his recruitment into the ranks of community organizers. It began there and blossomed into a quarter century of intricate relationships with both on-the-record and in-all-but-name socialists. I’ve spent the last two years in the archives unraveling the connections. Here are a few.
So would aiding and abetting terrorists to kill US soldiers qualify as behavior unbefitting of a sitting US senator? On October 12, Senator Barabara Boxer (D-CA) secured diplomatic courtesy letters that allowed Code Pink activists to travel to Fallujah, Iraq in late 2004 to donate $600,000 worth of humanitarian aid to the people who had just killed 51 Americans and wounded 560 more earlier that month.
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ISLAM
An Afghan woman whose nose was cut off by her husband under the Taliban's authoritarian rule was honored this weekend at an event in California, where she unveiled her new prosthetic nose for the first time.
The ideology that reigns in Saudi Arabia comes into plain view on the website of the Council of Senior Religious Scholars, where boys and girls sharing a swimming pool causes "mischief and evil" and bringing flowers to a hospital patient is to be discouraged because it's a foreign custom that "imitates Allah's adversaries."
A senior Muslim cleric who runs Britain’s largest network of Sharia courts says that there is no such thing as rape within marriage.
A film portraying the real-life stoning of an Iranian woman is opening in London, but it's a film the Iranian government does not want the world to see. The film's director claims some European governments have been reluctant to support it - fearful of antagonising Iran's regime.
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ACTIVISM
In 2003, Lt. Col. Allen West forced an Iraqi prisoner to the ground, counted down to zero and fired a pistol over his head, scaring him into revealing planned attacks on U.S. troops. The Army relieved him of command. In ordinary times, such an event might destroy a man's career in public service. But 2010 is no ordinary time, and Mr. West may soon be in command again—this time as a tea-party-backed, Republican congressman from South Florida.
The Combat Veterans for Congress PAC is dedicated to supporting the election of fiscally conservative Combat Veterans to Congress. We seek Combat Veterans For Congress who believe in limited government, will rein in the out of control spending of Congress, are committed to preserving and defending the U.S. Constitution, and will support the independence and freedom of the individual as outlined in the Bill of Rights. We support Combat Veterans For Congress who are dedicated to promoting The Free Enterprise System creating the greatest economic engine in the history of mankind, provide for a strong national defense, and will endorse the teaching of U.S. history and the Founding Fathers’ core values in educational institutions.
This organization supports twenty six combat veterans running for Congress, including our own Dick Muri: A Sept. poll showed he is within 3% of defeating Adam Smith.
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GLOBALONEY
The radical green movement is all about scaring the public into adopting unpopular policy initiatives, such as hefty taxes on important sources of energy and increased government direction of our lives through regulation. The Chicken Little strategy can work if the possibility of major disruptions such as a devastating Katrina-style hurricane push people into embracing protection from Washington. Unfortunately for the scaremongers, the disruptions just aren't happening…..worldwide hurricane activity has reached a 33-year low. That's why British screenwriter Richard Curtis released a video for the "10:10" campaign…The short "No Pressure" film used techniques right out of a horror flick to depict a schoolteacher blowing up two children who failed to show any interest in pestering their parents to install insulation or squiggly light bulbs to "keep the planet safe for everyone."
In light of the recent environmental controversy over splattergate, where the green propaganda ad in the United Kingdom explosively became gory red in the classroom, it is time to be reminded that the Nazis started out green but became bloody red. This political reality came much to the dismay of many German conservationists as they slowly found out the real intent of Adolf Hitler.
Stephen Moore: California’s Green Nightmare: It's hard to know where the fairy tale of "green jobs" first came from. It was probably a clever marketing scheme by radical environmentalists who realized that their anti-growth climate change agenda wasn't going to sell among the American electorate if workers realized how many jobs would be eviscerated by the new taxes and regulation. So, from somewhere out of Madison Avenue or K Street, the left devised the green jobs story line: we can impose a $1 trillion new tax on the U.S. economy over the next decade, and it will save jobs,
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ARTICLES
This is what some liberals are saying now: “Why Obama Is in the Jaws of Political Death……most politically engaged elites have reached the same conclusions: the White House is in over its head, isolated, insular, arrogant and clueless about how to get along with or persuade members of Congress, the media, the business community or working-class voters. This view is held by Fox News pundits, executives and anchors at the major old-media outlets, reporters who cover the White House, Democratic and Republican congressional leaders and governors, many Democratic business people and lawyers who raised big money for Obama in 2008, and even some members of the Administration just beyond the inner circle.”
“There is a new disease spreading like a cancer in doctors' offices and hospitals throughout the U.S. I have named it Doctor Unavailability Syndrome (DUS).”
Private health insurance in the U.S. will be dead in three years, said U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn."There will be no insurance industry left in three years," Coburn told the Republican Women's Club of Tulsa County. "That is by design. You’re going to make insurance unaffordable for everyone -- which is what they want. Because if there’s no private insurance left, what’s left? Government-centered, government-run, single-payer health care.”
A poll showing Republican challenger Ruth McClung leading four–term Democratic incumbent Raul Grijalva 39%-37% in Arizona 7. This district was designed to be Arizona’s second Hispanic majority House district (it was 54% Hispanic in 2000) and to be safe Democratic
Every passing year sees significant growth in the mass of Americans dependent on the federal government for life's necessities, from basic nutrition to shelter and health care. This implacable trend — long a concern of economists and political scientists — is beginning to alarm ordinary citizens as well. Why the increase? Well, for one thing, dependency-creating programs keep offering Americans more and more benefits. Government support for dependent persons has grown from $7,293 per person in 1962, to $31,950 last year (both figures expressed in 2005 dollars). That's a more than fourfold increase in the richness of the benefits, making dependence on government an ever-sweeter deal — one that gets harder and harder to walk away from. Another reason is that fewer and fewer people pay for the richer benefits. All adult Americans can vote, but not all voters pay taxes. In 2008, more than 132 million Americans paid no income taxes. That's nearly half — 43.6 percent — of all Americans, more than three times the percentage that prevailed just 25 years earlier.
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NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
Michael Faulkner may be the first Republican in 40 years that can beat Charlie Rangel:
New TV series, here’s the trailer,”Sarah Palin’s Alaska”
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LATE NITE
Jay Leno: The White House said that the Democrats have “the momentum” going into midterm elections. Of course you have momentum when you’re going downhill fast…..Vice President Joe Biden says that President Obama has asked him to run with him in 2012. So on behalf of all late night hosts, thank you Mr. President……For the first time in history, there are 100,000 home foreclosures in the month of September. A hundred-thousand people were told they’re going to lose their house. A hundred-thousand and one, if you count Nancy Pelosi.
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WISE WORDS
"How prone all human institutions have been to decay; how subject the best-formed and most wisely organized governments have been to lose their check and totally dissolve; how difficult it has been for mankind, in all ages and countries, to preserve their dearest rights and best privileges, impelled as it were by an irresistible fate of despotism."
–James Monroe
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