Generally, I don’t do a lot of writing on the weekends, but I was thinking about reviving an old practice of speedlinking different articles that I find interesting.

If you like this idea, leave a comment below saying so.

Anyway, here’s this weekends links:

• Michael Steele is now the RNC Chairman. When will the racist attacks start from the left? Remember, we were taught by the left that “party trumps race.”
• Straight out of “Atlas Shrugged,” Missouri Senator and Obama myrmidon Claire McCaskill is going to introduce legislation that will “cap compensation for employees of any private company that accepts federal dollars because of the economic downturn.”

  Look at it like this: a struggling company won’t be able to pay top dollar to the people who are steering the helm because they are hurting so bad they had to get a bailout. Now why, if you were part of this company, would you stay on in a position that paid far less than you could get somewhere else? How are businesses like this supposed to attract the best help? That’s why the best minds are in business and not government.

• A Chicago school teacher was projecting a huge picture of President Barack Obama on the wall next to the flag for the Pledge. Indoctrination anyone? Parents complained and the practice was stopped. Like Van Helsing wrote over at Right Wing News, “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”

  I think he got that from someone else though.

• Michelle Malkin has a housewarming gift for our cold blooded new president.
• Red State fisks the media’s treatment of Obama’s attempt to enter the White House through a window. Remember when Bush tried to open that locked door in China? Did Obama’s mistake get the same treatment? You know it didn’t. He’s brilliant, so we can explain it away.
• Did you know Iraqis are voting again today? And no one is dying or getting blown up? Seems the war is not lost after all, Sen. Reid. Hat Tip: Althouse
• Scappleface shows Obama’s brilliant method of increasing tax revenues:
  

  “The president’s plan is simple but ingenious,” said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, “He targets wealthy individuals who filed inaccurate tax forms, cheating the government out of tens of thousands of dollars. Then he just nominates them for cabinet positions. They suddenly see the error of their ways, and they cut checks for the full amount owed, plus interest.”

• Q and O has moved. Here’s their new site. Pretty snazzy.
• The Absurd Report shows, rather humorously, why it is important to check your child’s homework.
• With Bush out of the White House, who will the left turn to as the Republican whipping boy? Ben Smith says it’s El Rushbo. I say that’s a bad move.
• You are not going to believe this one. The new stimulus bill that passed the House with zero Republicans voting for it has in it a government plan to buy new cars and then crush them. No, I am not kidding.
• How calm is Iraq these days? Calm enough that our troops just had three planes worth of beer flown in for the Super Bowl.

And now for something completely different:

Image via Wikipedia

You would think that the party that likes to think up more and unusual ways of adding to the nation’s tax burden could get their own taxes paid.  Now, following on the heels of tax cheat Tim Geithner’s outrageous confirmation comes word that

Senator Tom Daschle owes more than $100,000 in back taxes:

FOX News confirmed that Daschle alerted the Senate Finance Committee, which will oversee his confirmation hearing, that the matter involves more than $100,000 in back taxes and interest for a car and driver that was provided to him for four years by Leo Hindery, a wealthy Democratic donor and longtime friend of Daschle’s.

Daschle incorrectly assumed the use of the car and driver was not subject to taxation. But the White House says he discovered the error during preparation for his confirmation and filed amended tax returns with the proper payment and interest.

I’m sure this is just another innocent mistake. 

Daschle is still going to be confirmed.  It’s guaranteed.  It’s an outrage that these tax cheats are being put in charge of the IRS and a health and human services.

Is there anyone in Obama’s administration that knows how to do their taxes?  Does it even matter anymore?

It was the headline that caught my eye, but once I got into the meat of the article there were more disturbing things in it than the idea that recycling is adding to global warming.

First off, the idea behind this is that they are producing an awful lot of carbon getting the garbage in England to where it is recycled.  One wonders whether they should, wait for it…just burn it:

Peter Jones suggested that an “urgent” review of Labour’s policy on recycling was needed to make sure the collection, transportation and processing of recyclable material was not causing a net increase in greenhouse gases.

Mr Jones, a former director of the waste firm Biffa and now an adviser to environment ministers and the London Mayor, Boris Johnson, also dismissed kerbside recycling collections in many areas as “stupid” because they mixed together different materials, rendering them useless for recycling.

He suggested that much of the country’s waste should simply be burnt to generate electricity.

“It might be that the global warming impact of putting material through an incinerator five miles down the road is actually less than recycling it 3,000 miles away,” he said.

I don’t know if they were burning it before and then switched to recycling it in China, but if you can attack a coal plant because of global warming, then I imagine a rubbish incinerator is a prime target.  But this illustrates the non-sensical nature of the left and brings us back to Quinn’s First Law:  Liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent.

But there was more than the above in the article that troubled me.  It troubled me because we now have a Congress and Executive branch with the same green-brained ideas Great Britain has had for years.  Is this a sign of our future in America:

In some parts of the country, residents have to sort their waste into as many as seven containers, including food waste bins, which has helped councils to justify the scrapping of weekly bin collections.

GREAT SCOTT!  What is the carbon footprint of creating seven rubbish containers per resident?  Anyone?  I wish that were the worst of it, but get a load of this:

Some town halls have admitted using anti-terrorism legislation to snoop on householders who fail to recycle properly…

Un. Be. Lievable. 

And then there is this one:

…councils have so far refused to test the Government’s bin taxes, under which people would be fined for throwing out too much rubbish.

“Fined for throwing out too much rubbish.”  What are you supposed to do with it if you have it and it’s over your limit?  Keep it in the house?

Behold the green future that lies before you.  Under the guise of liberalism and environmentalism, the government will have an increasingly irritating and bizarre role in your life.  Now that, my friends, is change.

Rep. John Carter (R-Mars) thinks you, the average American taxpayer, should be treated the same way Democrats in Washington are treated.  Because of that, he has introduced new legislation called the “Rangel Rule,” named after Rep. Charlie Rangel of New York.

Rep. Carter introduced a bill Wednesday to eliminate all IRS penalties and interest for paying taxes past due.

The legislation calls for the creation of what he calls the, “Rangel Rule,” — drawing attention to the recent legal issues of House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., enabling citizens who fail to pay taxes on time to do so later with no additional fees.

Rangel, who writes the country’s tax policies, acknowledged last fall that he failed to pay thousands in real estate taxes for rental income he earned from a property in the Dominican Republic.

As of September 2008 the Harlem Democrat reportedly paid back more than $10,000 in taxes but that did not include any IRS penalties.

“Your citizens back home should have the same rights and benefits that come to you as a member of congress. You shouldn’t be treated any differently under the law than your citizens back home,” Carter said.

He added that citizens should receive the “same courtesy” that the IRS is allegedly granting Rangel and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who also recently acknowledged a failure to pay taxes.

Democrats want to tax you, but don’t want to pay the taxes themselves.  How many times to I have to write about liberal hypocrisy today?

Rangel didn’t bother to personally respond to the bill, but he did send one of his minions:

A spokesman for the New York Democrat would not comment on the state of the tax issue, which is currently under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, but did respond to the Carter bill.

“This legislation is unnecessary. All taxpayers currently receive equal treatment under the law,” Rangel spokesman Emile Milne said.

Sure they do.  That’s why the stimulus package that just passed gives tax rebates to people who didn’t pay any taxes.  I hope he gets nailed for this, but I am guessing nothing will become of it.  He’s a Democrat, and that means never having to say you are sorry.

Oh, and John Carter isn’t really from Mars.  He’s from the great state of Texas.

Remember this?

The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat.

“He’s from Hawaii, O.K.?” said Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, who occupies the small but strategically located office next door to his boss. “He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there.”

Once again, liberal hypocrisy rears it’s ugly head.  Do as I say, not as I do.  You keep your house cooler.  Wear a sweater, right Mr. Carter?

But then, if Obama wore his suit coat, would he need to crank up the heat?

Here is the thing.  Liberals all want sacrifice for the great good.  They just don’t want to do the sacrificing. 

President Obama has his panties in a wad because there are some Wall Street executives who are pulling in billion dollar bonuses when they are receiving government bailouts.  That’s irresponsible, he says:

“It is shameful,” Obama said from the Oval Office. “And part of what we’re going to need is for the folks on Wall Street who are asking for help to show some restraint, and show some discipline, and show some sense of responsibility.”

Shameful?  Perhaps it was just an innocent mistake, your Presidenciness.  I mean, you are sitting next to a tax cheat you nominated to be in charge of the IRS.  Do you really want to be preachy about responsibility in that forum?

It’s also the height of irony for a guy who is about to sign a trillion dollar “stimulus package” to call for private industry to show some restraint. 

And about those billion dollar bonuses…I would bet that most of those were contractual in nature, meaning the companies had to give them out, regardless of performance or profit.  So, legally, they had to pay them. 

And how many of those receiving bonuses took federal money?  And those that did, how many were forced to take a handout?

UPDATE:

Found this in Neal’s Nuze, a great read every morning.  While Obama is blasting Wall Street for taking bonuses, New York City and State lose almost $1,000,000,000 in taxes.  Why?  Because Wall Street bonuses were down this year:

New York state will lose a whopping $1 billion in tax revenues this year because cash bonuses to Wall Street employees plummeted 44 percent in 2008, according to a bombshell new report.

In an analysis released this morning by State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, he estimates that the securities industry paid its New York City employees $18.4 billion in bonuses last year compared to $33 billion in 2007 — a drop in bonuses that will also cost the city $275 million.

Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Robert McDowell has been warning of a return of the Fairness Doctrine for years now.  In 2006, he told bloggers at the Heritage Foundation about a then recent ruling by the FCC to restrict Comcast from “engaging in certain Internet practices.”  He warned then that a new Fairness Doctrine for the Internet could be “intertwined with a net neutrality battle.”

The result might end with the government regulating content on the Web, he warned. McDowell, who was against reprimanding Comcast, said the net neutrality effort could win the support of “a few isolated conservatives” who may not fully realize the long-term effects of government regulation.

McDowell reiterated those sentiments recently in a speech to the Media Institute.  He warned that the Fairness Doctrine probably won’t come back as it was before, because that brand is damaged.  He warned us to look out for a new brand:

He suggested the doctrine could be woven into the fabric of policy initiatives with names like localism, diversity or network neutrality. “According to some, the premise of any of these initiatives is similar to the philosophical underpinnings of the Doctrine: the government must keep electronic conduits of information viewpoint neutral,” he said.

McDowell suggested that a stealth version of the doctrine may already be teed up at the FCC in the form of community advisory boards to help determine local programming. McDowell says he is fine with those boards if they are voluntary–some stations already seek such input. But that if they are required, as the FCC has proposed, “Would not such a policy be akin to re-imposition of the Doctrine, albeit under a different name and sales pitch?”

While President Obama has spoken about his opposition to a new Fairness Doctrine, he has been an advocate for “localism“:

Jim Boulet, Jr., the head of English First in Washington, D.C., one of whose projects is www.keeprushontheair.com, has been studying and warning for months about the morphing of FCC localism. Boulet notes to Human Events the following:

• On September 20, 2007, Obama submitted a pro-localism written statement to an FCC hearing at the Chicago headquarters of Rev. Jess Jackson Sr.’s Operation Push. One month later, an insistent Obama sent a public letter to Chairman Martin stating, “The Commission has failed to further the goals of diversity in the media and promote localism.”

• The head of Obama’s transition team is John Podesta, President and CEO of the Center for American Progress. In 2007, the Center issued a report, The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio, which concluded there were too many conservatives on the radio because of “the absence of localism in American radio markets” and urged the FCC to “[e]nsure greater local accountability over radio licensing.

• Podesta’s choice as head of the FCC transition team is Henry Rivera, a Director and General Counsel of the above-noted Benton Foundation and chairman of the Minority Media Telecommunications Council, which has stated: “Broadcasters must reach beyond the business sector and look for leaders [think community organizers] in the civic, religious, and non-profit sectors that regularly serve the needs of the community, particularly the needs of minority groups that are typically poorly served by the broadcasting industry as a whole.”

• Bowing to this pressure even while Bush is still President, the FCC proposed on January 24, 2008, the creation of permanent station advisory boards comprised of local officials and other community leaders, to periodically advise them of local needs and issues to ensure content diversity on the air.

• Any station that fails to placate these “local community leaders” would then be subject to license revocation by the FCC with an accelerated license review every two years as opposed to the current eight years. This would allow each station license in America to be attacked twice during just one Obama term.

McDowell warns of a new effort to impose a Fairness Doctrine on cable, satellite and even the Internet:

“Certain legal commentators have suggested that a new corollary of the Doctrine should be fashioned for the Internet, on the theory that web surfers should be exposed to topics and views that they have not chosen for themselves,” adding: “I am not making this up.”

If there are people in the Obama administration eager to shut up conservatives on national radio, what makes you think they would be content to stop there? 

Photo Credit:

•  °๋§ ợ§ღєηŧ

The Democrats are still trying to get the Republicans involved in the stimulus bill.  And when I say involved, I don’t mean they are reaching out in a bipartisan nature, asking them for input and advice on how to really make the country stronger. 

No, when I say involved, I mean, the Democrats want the Republicans there to share the blame when this thing tanks.  Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said:

“People vote for what they believe in. Clearly, the Republicans did not believe in the agenda that I just described for you, and that’s probably one of the reasons they voted that way. I think they probably voted their conscience and they couldn’t support that. …

We reached out to the Republicans all along the way, and they know it. And they know it. They were part of the original bill, with the — some of the tax provisions were their suggestions. They had what they asked for in terms of committee mark-up. They had the rule on the floor that gave them plenty of opportunity to make changes. They just didn’t have the ideas that had the support of the majority of the people in the Congress. ”

You can bet that those same tax provisions will be in the hot seat when the liberal stimulus bill fails or makes things worse.  The only thing saving the Republicans is not one of them voted for the bill.  That will give them some necessary separation from the law when the truth of it comes out. 

But the really funny part of the article is Pelosi saying she wasn’t trying to be partisan.  This woman is as partisan as they come.  For example, how many Republican amendments were allowed to the bill?  Sen. Jim DeMint knows:

“The Senate committee that addresses this has produced a bill and we’ll start talking about it next week,” Senator DeMint said in an interview today on Fox News. “It’s very much like the House bill. They rejected every Republican amendment. So this idea of bipartisanship is a bunch of rhetoric. There is no bipartisanship on this massive spending bill, but I think it is going to help define the Republicans and the Democrats once again because every Republican in the House rejected this and I think every Republican in the Senate might do as well.”

Hopefully, there is some spine leftover from the House Republicans, because perennial RINO Senators like Olympia Snowe are going to need all the help they can get in order to vote with conservatives.  But they have to vote against this.  Let the Democrats own it.  All of it.

Let the failure be theirs. 

Photo Credit:

• Breslow

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.

~ Saul Alinsky, “Rules for Radicals,” No. 13

We have all heard about how crazy liberals are. Conservative intellectual and radio host Michael Savage even wrote a book about this phenomenon, his 2005 New York Times best-seller, “Liberalism is a Mental Disorder.” Likewise, in 2008, Dr. Lyle H. Rossiter Jr., M.D., wrote in his best-seller, “The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness,” the following:

The roots of liberalism – and its associated madness – can be clearly identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind.

Liberals are liberals first. Am I being polemical? Yes, to a degree, but I am not being personal. I’m not contending that all liberals are crazy, but I will say, along with Dr. Savage and Dr. Rossiter, that a logical, legal and medical case can be made that liberalism (i.e., socialism, progressivism, egalitarianism) is not a rational political belief system.

On this point, last Friday, President Obama chided Republican leaders for being stupid enough to listen to conservative stalwart Rush Limbaugh. Obama said, “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.” With a hushed silence over the room, the messiah went further saying, “If we don’t get this done we (the Democrats) could lose seats and I could lose re-election. But we can’t let people like Rush Limbaugh stall this. That’s how things don’t get done in this town.”

Rush was clicking on all cylinders over the weekend when he remarked about Obama’s criticism of him in this manner:

Obama’s plan would buy votes for the Democrat Party in the same way FDR’s New Deal established majority power for 50 years of Democrat rule, and it would also simultaneously seriously damage any hope of future tax cuts. … Put simply, I believe [economic] stimulus is aimed at re-establishing “eternal” power for the Democrat Party rather than stimulating the economy, because anyone with a brain knows this is NOT how you stimulate the economy.

When President Obama promised America “FDR, part II,” few of the political pundits took notice because ideologically they are elitists, liberals and socialists like Obama. The propaganda press, the professors of the academy, judges, the Democrats and most Republicans all have fallen prey to the siren song of socialism and leviathan government taking over more and more of private enterprise. Wall Street, the investment banks, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the home mortgage industry, the auto industry, states like California, Arizona and Michigan on the verge of bankruptcy, even the porn industry, is just the beginning. They all want “bailouts” i.e., “welfare,” i.e., unearned, undeserved, unconstitutional confiscation of money belonging to “We the People” and given to others who didn’t earn it and don’t deserve it to secure Democrat Party votes in perpetuity. It’s legalized thievery. It is Mafia tactics on a grand scale.

What the GOP seems oblivious to knowing and what I am trying to teach my students at Savannah State University is politics through a historical lens. That means we study politics (or any other subject for that matter) through the lens and judgment of history and through the non-partisan philosophy of Veritas – truth. All else is irrelevant propaganda.

That said, history has definitively demonstrated that since President Theodore Roosevelt, liberals (or “progressives,” which was what socialists and liberals were called 100 years ago) made policy proposals not with the intent of solving real social, economic, education, legal, race, class, gender problems, but to solidify their power over the people forever. Just look at some of the political philosophy, policy and legislation passed by presidential executive order or by illegal collusion with Congress over the past 100 years:

• Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09) – the first true “progressive” president, though a Republican, invented the “imperial presidency” and used the “bully pulpit” and his “Fair Deal” policies to concoct all sorts of policies and programs that had no correlation with free-market capitalism (i.e., “trust busting”) or respect for private property. (Roosevelt set aside more land for national parks and nature preserves than all of his predecessors combined, 194 million acres.)
• Woodrow Wilson (1913-21) – Jonah Goldberg, in his important book, “Liberal Fascism,” quoted this president: “True leaders” uses the masses like “tools”; “All progressives ask or desire is permission – in an era when ‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ is the scientific word – to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.”
• Franklin Delano Roosevelt [FDR] (1933-45) – Used the stock market crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression as a pretext to enact his “New Deal” to grow the government in gargantuan proportions over the people and to use the socialist welfare state as the “power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe. …”
• Lyndon B. Johnson [LBJ] (1963-69) – “The Great Society” or “War against Poverty” programs including AFDC, Food Stamp Act, Medicare, Medicaid; greatly expanded FDR’s welfare state to connect every conceivable aspect of the American citizen to the tentacles of leviathan government. (Remember LBJ was a protégé of FDR.)
• Richard Nixon (1969-74) – Although a “Republican,” Nixon gave America socialist wage and price controls, the Environmental Protection Agency and affirmative action. He also gave us two unremarkable liberal justices on the Supreme Court: Chief Justice Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun. Blackmun authored the Roe v. Wade decision in 1972, arguably (after Dred Scott v. Sanford [1854] upholding slavery) the most murderous, infamous decision in the history of American constitutional law.
• George W. Bush (2001-09) – singlehandedly deconstructed the Reagan Revolution by his bungling, incoherent, incompetent domestic policies (amnesty for illegal aliens, No Child Left Behind), foreign policy (the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) and reinstituting a Bob Michaelesque GOP irrelevance that will probably mimic the wilderness years of 1954-94.
• Barack Obama (2009- ) – His first call as president was to Mahmoud Abbas, Yasser Arafat’s protégé and the leader of the “former” Palestinian terrorist group Fatah. His first public interview as president was with the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya. Obama’s first executive order was to limit lobbyist influence in Washington, D.C., while at the same time granting Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn an exemption because Lynn was a lobbyist for the defense contractor Raytheon. Other early policies that seem critical to Obama’s legacy and the Democrat majority in Congress can be summarized in three words – abortion, abortion and abortion.

Rush Limbaugh was right – “liberals are liberals first.” Liberal Democrats create policies not to solve problems, but to win elections and make more and more people dependent on the government welfare programs they provide. Since FDR, liberals have used every Machiavellian tactic to create a Leninist groupthink mentality; a slavish and addictive dependence on government that Democrats hope will keep them in power in perpetuity. This is what Rush meant he said, “Obama’s plan would buy votes for the Democrat Party in the same way FDR’s New Deal established majority power for 50 years of Democrat rule.”

When I see the GOP sitting politely with President Obama before the cameras – neutered, compliant and irrelevant – I start shouting at my TV set: “WHERE ARE THE REAL MEN IN THE GOP!?” Then Rush helped me to remember: Don’t think Obama, think Saul Alinsky, Obama’s community organizer mentor, who said in Rule 13 of Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” – “Pick the target [Rush Limbaugh, the conservative base], freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.” This is what President Obama masterfully executed at last Friday’s press conference with the GOP.

Why don’t the Republicans understand that they are playing checkers while Obama and the Democrats are playing chess? The GOP is trying to win an election in the next two years, and the Democrats are using Machiavellian tactics to win elections for the next 40 years. Perhaps that’s why the GOP doesn’t stand for the “Grand Old Party” anymore. The more appropriate acronym is “GIP” … the “Grand Irrelevant Party.”

Author: Dr. Ellis Washington

(Also published at WesternFront America)

In 2007, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a close ally of Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) told The Hill, “It’s time to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine. I have this old-fashioned attitude that when Americans hear both sides of the story, they’re in a better position to make a decision.”

Senate Rules Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) last year said, “I believe very strongly that the airwaves are public and people use these airwaves for profit. But there is a responsibility to see that both sides and not just one side of the big public questions of debate of the day are aired and are aired with some modicum of fairness.”

Rules for Radicals says:  Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.

If the liberals are to silence talk radio, they have to attack the most powerful person in talk radio.  They have to attack Rush.  They can’t attack talk radio, but they can further the Fairness Doctrine by using tactics like the above.

That’s why you see the Democrat party creating petitions against broadcasters.  It’s all part of the agenda.