From the Heritage Foundation: 

Remember ACORN? The Association of Community Organizations for Reform (ACORN), which has been plagued by allegations of voter fraud and abuse? It appears the chips just keep getting cashed in for the group that President Barack Obama once counseled as an attorney [and whose personnel he trained – JB] First it was discovered that they were going to literally ‘cash in’ on the $800 Billion “Stimulus” bill that lawmakers ensured would give them access to hundreds of millions of dollars. Not really the ’stimulus’ people were expecting. Then it was discovered that the White House and Congressional leaders were pushing for a new ‘Fairness Doctrine’ at the behest of ACORN.

Now we learn that President Obama has recruited them as “National Partners” to the 2010 U.S. Census. Remember the Census? The Census was one of the reasons Senator Judd Gregg withdrew his name from consideration for Commerce Secretary after he learned the White House would be moving the ‘non-partisan’ agency under the control of the ‘ultra-partisan’ White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

And this from the American Spectator:

In recent months demands for ACORN to be investigated under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) for repeated incidents of electoral fraud have been growing. But voting-related fraud is just the tip of the iceberg. ACORN runs a mob-style "protection" racket known within the radical direct-action group as the "muscle for the money" program, a lawyer told the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties today… The taxpayer-subsidized ACORN network, which owes millions of dollars in back taxes, also played a major role in the subprime mortgage mess that has undermined Americans’ support for free market problem-solving and set off a worldwide chain of financial troubles. And then there’s ACORN’s eight-year-long coverup of the million-dollar embezzlement by founder Wade Rathke’s brother. When ACORN board members Marcel Reid and Karen Inman demanded to see the financial documents, they were expelled from the group. What else is ACORN hiding?

But Congress is giving them more money and more power. The ideal people, ACORN, to trust with the Census?

 On double standards in ‘world opinion’ read this article by Discover The Networks. An extract: : 

The moment one recognizes "world opinion" for what it is — a statement of moral cowardice, one is no longer enthralled by the term. That "world opinion" at this moment allegedly loathes America and Israel is a badge of honor to be worn proudly by those countries. It is when "world opinion" and its news media start liking you that you should wonder if you’ve lost your way.

Obama says he wants to negotiate with ‘moderate factions of the Taliban’.  

Robert Spencer writes:

Who are these moderate Taliban? Where can they be found? Waheed Mozhdah, the director of the Afghan Foreign Ministry’s Middle East and Africa department when the Taliban were in power, dismisses the President’s hopes as “a dream more than reality,” asking derisively: “Where are the so-called moderate Taliban? Who are the moderate Taliban?” Newspaper editor Muhammad Qaseem Akhgar declared: “‘Moderate Taliban’ is like ‘moderate killer.’ Is there such a thing?” 

Obama offered no details as to why he believed in these fantastical creatures, but Vice President Joe Biden, ever helpful, chimed in with some statistics manifesting his confidence in their existence. “Five percent of the Taliban is incorrigible,” he explained, “not susceptible to anything other than being defeated. Another 25 percent or so are not quite sure, in my view, of the intensity of their commitment to the insurgency. Roughly 70 percent are involved because of the money.” He didn’t explain how he arrived at these figures, but one would think that if they were remotely accurate, we would see some evidence of dissension within Taliban ranks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with moderate elements objecting to their colleagues’ more extreme behavior.

Last Friday, for example, Taliban commander Mohammed Ibrahim Hanafi told CNN that the Taliban considered foreign aid workers to be spies, and was planning to execute them. “Our law,” he declared, “is still the same old law which was in place during our rule in Afghanistan. Mullah Mohammad Omar was our leader and he is still our head and leader and so we will follow the same law as before.” That law includes prohibiting the education of girls, destroying girls’ schools all over the country, and even throwing acid in the faces of girls who dare to try to get an education. The Taliban in the Swat Valley in northwest Pakistan has bombed or burned down around 300 girls’ schools, affecting over 100,000 students. And in Afghanistan over 600 schools have not opened this year because they could not guarantee their students’ security. 

There is no record of any moderate Taliban elements speaking out against either the execution of foreign aid workers or the closing of girls’ schools and the terrorizing of female students.

The Taliban have also targeted police stations – because they are considered outposts of the central government in Kabul – as well as video and CD stores, since Islamic law forbids music and images of human beings. Pakistan’s News International reported last month that “two police stations, 12 police posts, 80 video centres, around 300 CD shops, 25 barbershops, 24 bridges, 15 basic health units, an electricity grid station and a main gas supply line were either destroyed or severely damaged” by the Taliban as it has moved in recent months to gain control of Swat – which was once a thriving tourist spot.

There is no record of any moderate Taliban elements speaking out against any of this, or lifting a finger to stop it. One would think that if these reasonable elements who can be negotiated with really constituted over two thirds of those who identify themselves as Taliban, as Biden claimed, there would be some trace of their existence somewhere – even a minute indication that they dissented from the harsh vision of draconian Sharia law that the Taliban imposed upon Afghanistan when it was in power in Kabul, and which it continues to impose upon those areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan that it currently controls.

Next week, expect Obama to announce that he plans to start talks with Santa Claus and unicorns.

 From Power Line: 

I don’t believe Barack Obama is an idiot. Truly, I don’t. And yet, whenever he talks without a teleprompter [which now has its own blog – JB], he makes you wonder. This verbal excursion is from today’s "townhall," conducted in California before a cheering throng of, no doubt, carefully selected fans:

The same is true with AIG. It was the right thing to do to step in. Here’s the problem. It’s almost like they’ve got – they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger. You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk them, ease that finger off the trigger.

If you’re a Democrat, maybe that reassures you that our President knows more about the economy than the average 9th grader [or more about bombs that have triggers than anyone else on earth- JB]. On the bright side, though, at least Edward Liddy knows he won’t be waterboarded!

 Of course the networks have brought it on themselves having (with the exception of Fox) dedicated themselves to bringing an exhibitionist child to power.  

‘Twinkle-toes’, ‘The Teleprompter Kid’, ‘The Affirmative Action President’, ‘The One’, ‘The Messiah’, ‘the Child’, are some of his more common soubriquets, not all of them aired by the networks. 

‘I am making a speech, I am being filmed, I have an adoring crowd about me, therefore I AM,’ is his philosophy, his frequent performances imply.  

From The Live Feed:

Networks are pulling their shows over to the side of the road to make room for the lights and sirens of president Barack Obama’s latest primetime address.

Obama will take to the air next Tuesday evening on four broadcast networks and bump the most popular series on television, Fox’s "American Idol."

Fulfilling their scheduling civic duty is starting to seem increasingly cumbersome to broadcasters, however. Between a struggling economy and ratings sagging in midseason, every interruption costs networks advertising dollars and momentum. 

"At a time when we’re struggling not only financially but to build audiences, this doesn’t help on either front," one network executive said. "These repeated interruptions – and the rumor of even more to come – really make it difficult to build audience flow and loyalty. We will all lose one or two million dollars for this."

The presidential election resulted in a fall season regularly interrupted by political news coverage, followed by primetime inauguration coverage, then two primetime speeches about the economy. The White House requesting yet another primetime slot, during sweeps and right after several shows dropped to new lows in last night’s ratings, has some executives exasperated.

"I believe in the president and his policies, and as broadcasters we have a responsibility to provide the airtime," said another network insider. "But these frequent primetime requests are wreaking serious havoc with our schedule and our advertisers. Ratings are down everywhere and the airtime is costing us all significant dollars when we can least afford it."

More about the British National Health Service. A cautionary tale.

Dear Americans,

You may have read my article in January which urged you not to emulate our National Health Service.  I described how it doesn’t work, it is too expensive (100 billion pounds a year), too big, it allows the state to exercise unacceptable power over the individual, it bribes the medical profession to collude,  it makes the individual patient powerless and small and guilty for being sick, it abandons the sick and old, it is filthy beyond description, it is run on a target performance model that distorts patient care, it is the church of Socialists who use it to preach class war. The sermon goes like this: the goal is equal treatment for all.  The original aim – a minimum not an equal standard – has been forgotten. All this is combined with an old fashioned paternalism which treats the patient with yet more disdain. And on top of all this, the service is expansionist, planning to control other aspects of our lives and behaviour with the excuse that this will improve our health.

Well if you didn’t read it; that was a fair summary. And now a postscript: I told you so.

This week a report was published about Stafford Hospital by the Healthcare Commission. The Commission described the hospital as “appalling and chaotic”.  When you allow for official British understatement on top of this, your jaws should be dropping.  Up to 1200 patients may have died because of the failures pointed out in this report.   Patients were left hungry and thirsty for days.  They drank the flower water.  They were not given pain-killers as they lay dying.   There was neglect, according to the report, at “virtually every stage” of treatment.  Wards were filthy with blood and excrement.  People had to sit in soiled bedding. Nurses turned off heart monitors because they did not know how to use the equipment.  Receptionists with no medical training decided the order of treatment for arrivals in Accident and Emergency.  One patient with a bone sticking out of his elbow waited for hours for treatment with no pain relief.

Patients were ‘dumped’ in “clinical decision units” for days in order to avoid breaking the performance targets.  Operations were postponed for four days and patients starved for those four days.  

A wonderful woman,  Julie Bailey, who slept in a chair next to her mother as the mother died over eight weeks, set up the campaign group which has shed light on this terrible hell of ‘care’.  However, it all took time because the organisation running the hospital said that anomalies in the death rate were the result of  “problems with recording data not problems with quality of care”.  

The man in charge of the place while all this happened is still receiving his full pay.   May he get old and sick and sent to the loving embrace of Stafford Hospital!

 M. Westrop.

Some of us are old enough to remember the horrors perpetrated in the Communist Russian Empire. But those born since the USSR was destroyed (chiefly by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher winning the Cold War) need to learn what happened under Lenin, Stalin, and their successors; and as they are unlikely to be taught about this in their ‘politically correct’  left-leaning history courses, they should have informative books  brought to their attention in the hope that some at least will read them. 

These extracts come from a review of Inside the Stalin Archives by Jonathan Brent, in The New Criterion: 

The first volume in the series, The Secret World of American Communism, caused shock waves by demonstrating that the American Communist Party was not a group of home-grown idealists, as so many apologists claimed, but, from the start, conducted espionage and took orders directly from Moscow. Despite decades of leftist mockery and vilification, the basic picture provided by Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley of Alger Hiss and many others was correct. The Comintern, too, was from day one directed by Moscow as a tool of Russian foreign policy. And despite the desperate strategy of throwing all blame on Stalin so as to excuse Lenin, The Unknown Lenin, which reproduces a selection from some six thousand Lenin documents never before released, reveals bloodthirstiness that surprised even anti-Communists. During a famine, Lenin ordered his followers not to alleviate but to take advantage of mass starvation:

It is precisely now and only now when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy.

“can (and therefore must)”: Leninist and Soviet ideology held not just that the end justifies any means, but also that it was immoral not to use the utmost cruelty if that would help. And it was bound to help in at least one way—intimidating the population. From the beginning, terror was not just an expedient but a defining feature of Soviet Communism. In Terrorism and Communism, Trotsky was simply voicing a Bolshevik truism when he rejected “the bourgeois theory of the sanctity of human life.” In fact, Soviet ethics utterly rejected human rights, universal justice, or even basic human decency, for all concepts that apply to everyone might lead one to show mercy to a class enemy. In Bolshevism, there is no abstract justice, only “proletarian justice,” as defined by the Party. ..

Stalinism was idealist in another, even more terrifying sense: it aimed at controlling from within the very thoughts we think. In a toast delivered on November 7, 1937, at the height of the Terror, the Great Helmsman swore to destroy every enemy:

            Even if he was an old Bolshevik, we will destroy all his kin, his family. We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts—yes, his thoughts—threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin!

        Even the worst of the tsars never thought of punishing relatives for a criminal’s acts. But what is truly remarkable about this toast is the promise to murder people and their kin for thoughts. One must live in continual fear of one’s own mind.

Brent begins his book with a memorandum written by Andrei Vishinsky, Stalin’s chief prosecutor, to Nikolai Yezhov, the secret-police chief, about what he had seen in a tour of the Gulag. There were prisoners, Vishinsky explained, who had “deteriorated to the point of losing any resemblance to human beings.” An interrogator during the doctors’ plot wrote that, after one torture session, the elderly Dr. Vasilenko “lost his entire human aspect.” Perhaps the most important lesson to come from the Stalin archives is that any ideology that does not admit the existence of human nature winds up destroying not only countless lives but also the human soul.

How much better is Russia now? The answer is – a lot, but it’s still pretty bloody awful. 

Under Putin, Russia has turned away from a fleeting opportunity to embrace legality. A sort of mafia rules without breaking the law—because there is no real law. And yet, by comparison with the Soviet period, Russia is free and humane. To be sure, any journalist or businessman who displeases the regime is likely to be imprisoned, maimed, or killed. But millions are not arrested at random.

           Solzhenitsyn once asked why the bloodthirsty Macbeth killed only a few people while Lenin and Stalin murdered millions. He answered: Macbeth had no ideology. So far as we can tell, neither does Putin. Today no one tries to remake human nature. For the time being, and however precariously, the human spirit survives.

 David Limbaugh writes:

When Obama said he wanted to spread the wealth around, we now know (many of us knew then) that he wasn’t talking about fooling around at the margins. He was talking about major wealth redistribution and punitive action against upper-income earners. While this may tickle the ears of grass-roots class warriors, it’s the anthem of America’s destruction.

When government decides how much money each of us should have, we are no longer free. Make no mistake: Obama will not use the tax code and other weapons of government just to fund government services, but to determine how income is distributed. Don’t let the difference be lost on you.

When Obama says that "there is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few … and (that) it is our duty to change it," he is not just saying that higher-income earners don’t pay their fair share of taxes (which is absurd on its face). He is saying that they make too much money – as if that is any of his or government’s business.

While liberals deny this, all income groups did better under the Reagan tax cuts, from the lowest 20 percent to the highest 20 percent, precisely because marginal rate cuts provided an incentive for production by enhancing the connection between efforts and rewards. People work harder when they’re allowed to keep greater portions of the fruits of their labor. Production increases across the board, as does prosperity, thus the term "trickle down."

Conversely, when you separate efforts from rewards, you get less production and less prosperity. True, the higher-income earners earn and keep less, but that does not do middle- or lower-income earners any good.

When the coercive power of government is used to equalize incomes, it guarantees less prosperity across the board and spreads the misery, which is one of the many reasons Marxism and socialism have failed everywhere they’ve been tried.

Read the whole column here. 

We have no respect for Gordon Brown personally, but he is the Prime Minister of Great Britain – America’s closest ally –  and as his country’s representative he should have been treated with respect and courtesy by the President of the United States on his recent official visit to the US. Instead, Obama was off-hand and rude to him, later making the silly and childish excuse that he was ‘tired’.  Obama is not, however, too tired to court the heads of Islamic states, and even travel abroad to confer with them.   

Frank Gaffney writes:

On Friday, President Obama reiterated for the umpteenth time his determination to develop a “new relationship” with the Muslim world.  On this occasion, the audience were the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Unfortunately, it increasingly appears that, in so doing, he will be embracing the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood – an organization dedicated to promoting the theo-political-legal program authoritative Islam calls Shariah and that has the self-described mission of “destroying Western civilization from within.”

As part of Mr. Obama’s “Respect Islam” campaign, he will travel to Turkey in early April.  While there, he will not only pay tribute to an Islamist government that has systematically wrested every institution from the secular tradition of Ataturk and put the country squarely on the path to Islamification.  He will also participate in something called the “Alliance of Civilizations.”

The Alliance is a UN-sponsored affair that reflects – as, increasingly do most things the United Nations is involved in – the views of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).  The OIC is made up of 57 Muslim-majority nations. Thanks to support from Saudi Arabia and its proxies, the Muslim Brotherhood has become a driving force within the Conference and their agendas largely coincide.

For example, in 2005 a communiqué issued after a summit in Mecca declared: “The Conference underlined the need to collectively endeavor to reflect the noble Islamic values, counter Islamophobia, defamation of Islam and its values and desecration of Islamic holy sites, and to effectively coordinate with States as well as regional and international institutions and organizations to urge them to criminalize this phenomenon as a form of racism.”

Ominously, as part of its bid to “criminalize” Islamophobia, the OIC is seeking “deterrent punishments.” It insists that not only freedom of expression but all human rights be circumscribed by the OIC’s 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, which concludes with the caveat that, “All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shariah.” Translation: Liberties enshrined in the UN’s foundational Universal Declaration of Human Rights are largely rendered null and void.

Not that the UN has been a great upholder of liberty in practice. Quite the contrary, in fact. It is now such a threat to liberty, the best thing that could happen to it is its total abolition, before it evolves into an Islamic World Government imposing Shariah on us all. 

 The fastest way to wreck an economy is to impose price controls. 

They are coming now to American states and cities. 

Read about it here. An extract:  

Economists have long memories, and they point to price controls in the past that have had very negative consequences, such as gas lines in the 1970s that were caused by price caps on gasoline that made selling unprofitable.

"You had gas lines in the ’70s…. The tougher thing is to think of cases where there was not a shortage due to price controls," said George Mason University economics professor Dr. Tyler Cowen, author of "Discover Your Inner Economist."

Rent controls are among the most pernicious of price controls, economists say.

"In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city – except for bombing," said Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck, a former socialist who has been researching rent control since the 1960s.

"In New York City, the Bronx basically fell to pieces because of rent control. You even had the extreme of landlords burning down their houses."

The South Bronx lost 40 percent of its housing stock in the 1960s and ’70s, largely due to arson. Many buildings were suspected to have been torched by the landlords themselves, who found that their buildings were literally worthless: There was no way to make a profit due to rent controls, and nobody would buy a building that could not make a profit.

Burning the building allowed them to collect insurance money and pay off debts.

"The reason people ask for [rent control] is that those with contracts gain in the short term … It’s a way that politicians can buy votes," Lindbeck said. "But the policy really hurts people entering the market – young people and immigrants."