We are of the school of thought that holds taxation to be theft, though we concede that citizens must pay for the few essential functions of government, chiefly defense, law and order, the enforcing of the law of contract, the separation of infectious diseases (and locally for common facilities, of course). Adam Smith included instruction in basic literacy for the children of the poor, but we don’t see a need now, in America, for even the most elementary education to be paid for out of the common purse. (We acknowledge that this opinion is probably unpopular.)

The socialist state takes most of your earnings away from you, and when you die confiscates most of your capital worth so you cannot leave much to your children.

As the provider of the necessities of your life, the socialist state has the power to deprive you of them. Your life is in its hands, and you have no voice in its decisions, which is why socialism is called the road to serfdom.

Obama has set America on that road, and the descent is gathering pace.

This is from the Heritage Foundation’s Morning Bell today:

This year is actually the first year since 1916 that Americans do not have to pay any federal taxes when a family member dies. But thanks to the way Congress had to pass the legislation that phased out the Death Tax in 2001, it is set to go from zero percent to 55 percent at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 2010. The Death Tax is but one of many government taxes on capital and entrepreneurship, and its reinstatement will be yet another job killer from the Obama administration. It rewards estate tax lawyers, insurance companies and big businesses at the expense of small family-owned enterprises. According to a study by the American Family Business Foundation, a full repeal of the death tax, like the one [introduced by Republican Senator Jim DeMint, and] rejected by the Senate last night, would create 1.5 million jobs. Before the vote, Sen. DeMint described the tax as an “unfair, immoral double tax on property and assets that folks have already paid taxes on throughout their lives.” …

Last night’s vote to raise the Death Tax is just the beginning of the Obama administration’s historic tax hike campaign. Unless Congress acts to oppose President Obama’s agenda, everyone’s taxes on personal income, capital gains and dividends will rise….

For two generations after post-war reconstruction, Europe and America have pursued different economic models, and accordingly, moved in different economic directions. The American model was low tax, low spending and small government. It favored growth, income and vibrancy. The European model is high tax, high spending and big government. It favored fairness, equality and stability. It also featured unemployment rates double those of the United States, often hovering around 10 percent. Now that is no longer the case. Under Obama’s economic leadership, U.S. unemployment rates are surpassing Europe’s.

Last night’s vote was just the beginning of a larger choice the American people must make: do they want to continue down the Obama path of high taxes, high spending and high unemployment? Or do they still believe in American exceptionalism, in limited government and in a vibrant U.S. economy? Last night’s vote was a step in the wrong direction.

Is Obama evil? Does he intend to do evil?

Cal Thomas writes at Townhall:

The Obama people are not intrinsically evil. Like someone caught up in a cult, they sincerely believe in the fiction they are peddling: more taxes will produce a healthier economy; the record debt is not a problem; more regulation will result in banks and big businesses operating ethically and for the greater good of their customers and the country; nationalized health care will mean better care for the sick; unrestricted abortion and same-sex marriage are fine; unenforced immigration laws are good because Democrats need to import votes and Republicans want cheap labor.

Maybe he’s right. Maybe Obama intends good and is simply mistaken as to how to achieve it.

We cannot be certain what anyone’s unexpressed thoughts and intentions are.

But we can make some judgments by contemplating the choices they make, and Obama chose to follow Saul Alinsky, who dedicated his book “Rules for Radicals”  – the bible of the “community organizers” whose ranks included Barack Obama – “to Lucifer”. Was Alinsky “only joking”, or was he informing his readers that he meant to do evil?

It seems to be hard for Americans, generally speaking (and perhaps to their credit), to believe that anyone can actually mean to do evil.  They’d rather believe that those who produce evil outcomes are merely making a terrible mistake. Or are victims so stressed by whatever has made them suffer that they act out of uncontrollable but understandable emotion, and so are forgivable.

Europeans know better.

Our post below discusses the European cultivation of evil.

Judge Stephen C. Robinson

The Washington Post explains it. It ‘s all about race.

The court-ordered election that allowed [some] residents of one New York town to flip the lever six times for one candidate – and produced a Hispanic winner – could expand to other towns where minorities complain their voices aren’t being heard. …

The unusual election was imposed on Port Chester after a federal judge determined that Hispanics were being treated unfairly.

The 2010 Census is expected to show large increases in Latino populations and lawsuits alleging discrimination are likely to increase, said Rob Richie, executive director of FairVote, a nonprofit election research and reform group.

“The country’s been changing in a lot of places, with minority growth in exurbs and commuter cities, and there will be a realization that those minorities can’t elect candidates of choice,” Richie said.

That will leave minority groups, federal prosecutors and municipalities looking for ways to keep elections from violating the federal Voting Rights Act, which protects minorities’ constitutional right to equal protection under the law.

In Port Chester, trustees had been elected two at a time every two years, with conventional at-large voting. Most voters were white, and there were always six white trustees even though Hispanics made up half the population and nearly a quarter of the voters. Judge Stephen Robinson concluded the system violated U.S. law by diluting Hispanics’ votes.

The standard remedy was to break a municipality into districts, with one district including many from the minority, thereby increasing the chances for a candidate backed by the minority group. The Justice Department proposed that solution for Port Chester.

But the village of about 30,000 objected to districts. It suggested instead a system called cumulative voting. All six trustees would be elected at once and the voters could apportion their six votes as they wished – all six to one candidate, one each to six candidates or any combination.

The system, which has been used in Alabama, Illinois, South Dakota and Texas, allows a political minority to gain representation if it organizes behind specific candidates. Judge Robinson went for it, and cumulative voting was used for the first time in a New York municipality.

And surely not the last time. Obviously this idea has legs. It could become a peaceful caring way of disenfranchising despised classes and races, such as white males, Jews, Republicans, Tea Partiers, conservatives, individualists, soldiers, libertarians, anti-feminists, capitalists, free-marketeers, patriots, the rich, Iraq war approvers, habitual Rush Limbaugh listeners, global warming skeptics, big business executives, bankers, SUV drivers, fatties, Mormons, smokers, tobacconists, hunters, non-recyclers, furriers, gun-owners …

Note: This post needs correction. Please see comments by Malachi and Jillian Becker.

Of extraordinary interest, we think, is an essay by Anthony Daniels in The New Criterion, titled Ayn Rand: engineer of souls. (We cannot link to it, but it’s easy to find.)

We are admirers of Ayn Rand, but not uncritically. We believe, as she does, that capitalism is the only creator and sustainer of prosperity. We despise religion as she does. Like her we value reason. Her enormous novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead have probably won more believers in capitalism and devotees of personal liberty than any other book in any language, even surpassing Hayek’s essential text The Road to Serfdom; and for that she deserves lasting honor.

But her vision of humanity has a comic-book hyperbole about it which keeps her out of the rank of great writers. Her heroes are too big, too superior to us and everyone we’ll ever meet, to be likable. They inspire awe but not affection. We can be sure they’d look down on us if they knew us. We cannot emulate them, we can only wonder at them. They are like gods. They are intensely romantic, and romanticism is the enemy of reason.

Anthony Daniels lists her virtues and vices:

Rand’s virtues were as follows: she was highly intelligent; she was brave and uncompromising in defense of her ideas; she had a kind of iron integrity; and, though a fierce defender of capitalism, she was by no means avid for money herself. The propagation of truth as she saw it was far more important to her than her own material ease. Her vices, of course, were the mirror-image of her virtues, but, in my opinion, the mirror was a magnifying one. Her intelligence was narrow rather than broad. Though in theory a defender of freedom of thought and action, she was dogmatic, inflexible, and intolerant, not only in opinion but in behavior, and it led her to personal cruelty. In the name of her ideas, she was prepared to be deeply unpleasant. She hardened her ideas into ideology. Her integrity led to a lack of self-criticism; she frequently wrote twenty thousand words where one would do. …

A passionate hater of religion, Rand founded a cult around her own person, complete with rituals of excommunication; a passionate believer in rationality and logic, she was incapable of seeing the contradictions in her own work. She was a rationalist who was not entirely rational …

He goes on to paragraphs of stronger condemnation. He finds “horrible” cruelty in her. He perceives that though she was fanatically anti-collectivist, and though she had fled from Soviet Russia to the freedom of America, Stalin’s Russia remained within her.

Her unequivocal admiration bordering on worship of industrialization and the size of human construction as a mark of progress is profoundly Stalinist. Where Stalinist iconography would plant a giant chimney belching black smoke, Randian iconography would plant a skyscraper. (At the end of The Fountainhead, Roark receives a commission to build the tallest skyscraper in New York, its height being the guarantor of its moral grandeur. According to this scale of values, the Burj Dubai would be man’s crowning achievement so far.) Industrialists are to Rand what Stakhanovites were to Stalin: Both saw nature as an enemy, something to be beaten into submission. One doesn’t have to be an adherent of the Gaia hypothesis to know where this hatred of nature led.

Finally, Rand’s treasured theory of literature, what she called Romantic Realism, is virtually indistinguishable from Socialist Realism …

Rand’s heroes are not American but Soviet. The fact that they supposedly embody capitalist values makes no difference. Rand fulfilled Stalin’s criterion for the ideal writer: she tried to be an engineer of souls.

The analysis is not unjust.

But the recruiting sergeant to the Army of Light does not have to be the best exponent of the cause for which it fights.

While acknowledging and regretting all her faults, we keep, for her success as a dedicated recruiting sergeant, an abstract monument to Ayn Rand in our personal Hall of the Defenders of Individual Freedom.

Jillian Becker   June 19, 2010

Sparta: The government disciplined the citizenry to make every single man, woman and child healthy and strong. Kept them thinking alike too, soberly and politically correctly. Crowds could move perfectly in unison. Life was – well, spartan. Cold water, spare diet, low salt, lots of tasteless fiber, no alcohol, constant exercise …

And what came out of Sparta? Can you think of anything?

Athens: Mess and muddle, personal choices, private pursuits, idiosyncrasies, imagination, success and failure, high aspiration and low, virtue and vice, argument, a compost heap of ideas, fierce competition, lots of laughter, feasting, gaming, wine-quaffing …

And what came out of Athens? Science, philosophy, poetry, drama, art and craft and engines, in sum most of the ideas that launched Europe’s greatness. Start a list of the great Athenian names and works and inventions and it will soon run over the page.

Nothing new has emerged, or ever can, from a collective. Socialism kills the spirit and enervates the mind. It is static. It etherizes the will. It is soporifically boring. A collectivized society is a doomed society. There is no renewal, no advance in it. Socialism is a slow, generalized death.

Freedom is the source, the well, the fountain of all discovery, invention, innovation – all that can be called genuine “progress”.

The freedom we need is not the natural state of man. Nobody is free in a state of anarchy any more than in a tyranny. Freedom is a product of civilization. It must be protected by the rule of law, so that everyone’s freedom is limited only by everyone else’s.

To stay free, watch out for those who would force you to do all manner of things “for your own good”, and never let them have power over you.

A warning too late? In a recent article, David Limbaugh points out that under the would-be dictatorship of Barack Obama, America is being Spartanized, though he doesn’t use that analogy. Here’s part of what he says:

I cannot be the only one who feels as if every new day brings a new assault on this nation and its people by this administration. Indeed, many people I know say they can’t even watch the news anymore because it’s so depressing. And it is.

Some of these assaults occur under the radar, and others are right out in the open. As an example of the former, last week, President Obama issued an executive order “Establishing the National Prevention, Health Promotion, and Public Health Council,” which will focus on “lifestyle behavior modification (including smoking cessation, proper nutrition, appropriate exercise, mental health, behavioral health, substance-use disorder, and domestic violence screenings).” It will even recommend changes in federal policy to reduce “sedentary behavior.” …

The socialized medicine nightmare is already beginning. Many of us warned that Obamacare would serve as an all-purpose justification for government intervention in every aspect of our lives. Have we become so far removed from our founding principles that we don’t grasp the perniciousness of such government encroachments into our private lives and personal liberties?

You must read the executive order: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/executive-order-establishing-national-prevention-health-promotion-and-public-health. Then you’ll understand that the council and “Advisory Group” it establishes will not be merely advisory. The provisions of this “order” underscore the disturbing extent to which Obama and his band of authoritarians intend to control our lives.

The “Advisory Group,” in consultation with the council, must submit, by March 23, 2011, a “national strategy” to “set specific goals and objectives for improving the health of the United States through federally supported prevention, health promotion, and public health programs, consistent with ongoing goal setting efforts conducted by specific agencies.” …

Will we tolerate any manner of government control over the most minute aspects of our lives under the rationale that we have to improve our lifestyles to get healthier … ? Does liberty mean nothing to us anymore? …

Lifestyle behavior modification is none of the government’s business, but it is even less the prerogative of a renegade, unaccountable executive acting outside the law through unconstitutional executive orders. On that point, by the way, please check out Section 3G, which provides that the council will “carry out such other activities as are determined appropriate by the President.” No limitations, just whatever this omniscient president determines is appropriate.

Read it all here.

We have written quite often about the myth of man-made global warming. Now we can confidently declare that the myth is fading.

The collectivists who tried to frighten us into accepting poorer lives and “world governance” in order to “save the planet”, are disappointed. They’ll have to search for some other excuse to control us, and they’ll find one of course.

To the general public, the most persuasive argument against believing the myth is probably the economic crisis, the scientific arguments on both sides being hard for the non-scientist to follow.

Whatever the reason, the folks are no longer buying the scare.

Summing up the change in the climate of opinion on climate change, Cal Thomas writes at Townhall:

The myth of “global warming,” or climate change … is sinking with greater force than melting icebergs, if they were melting, which many believe they are not.

After spending years promoting “global warming,” the media are beginning to turn in the face of growing evidence that they have been wrong. The London Times recently reported: “Britain’s premier scientific institution [The Royal Society] is being forced to review its statements on climate change after a rebellion by members who question mankind’s contribution to rising temperatures.” …

In Canada, the polar bear — which has been used by global warming promoters to put a cuddly face on the issue — is in danger of not being endangered any longer. CBC News reported that the polar bear’s designation as a “species of special concern” has been suspended …

The New York Times recently lamented “global warmism’s loss of credibility” in a story about hundreds of “environmental activists who met to ponder this question: “if the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?” The “consensus” never was a consensus. Most of us may not have gotten an “A” in science, but we can sense when we are being bamboozled. …

Meteorologists, like Joe D’Aleo of The Weather Channel, are publicly distancing themselves from the false doctrine of global warming. D’Aleo says, “We’ll have La Nina conditions before the summer is over, and it will intensify further through the fall and winter. Thus we’ll have cooler temperatures for the next couple of years.”

Remember the scare ignited in 2007 by supposed melting Arctic ice caps? The Star Canada says a new analysis shows that the apparent change was the result of “shifting winds,” while an expedition last year to the North Pole discovered the ice “100 percent thicker than expected.” …

Watch for the hardcore “global warming” cultists to continue clinging to their beliefs; but also watch increasing numbers of scientists and eventually politicians to abandon this once “certain” faith and to look for other ways to control our lives. In that pursuit, the left never quits. Rather than acknowledge their error, they will go on to make new mistakes, knowing they will never be held accountable.

WorldNetDaily reports that yet another Marxist ideologue has been appointed to an advisory position at the White House.

Obama’s appointment of Ben Scott as Innovation Adviser shows that he is steadily intent on putting an end to the freedom of the internet.

Ben Scott was policy director of the far left Free Press, which is dedicated to the cause of imposing government regulation of the media in general and the internet in particular. Just as their name “Free Press” is Orwellian Newspeak for their aim of suppressing conservative views in the press, so are their words for internet control. “Net neutrality” they call it.

Obviously the chief target of the Free Press Marxists is any medium of conservative opinion: Talk Radio, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and all of us who speak our minds freely on the internet. But they wouldn’t stop there. They want  total government control of the media.

Aaron Klein, author of the WND report, writes:

Scott authored a book, “The Future of Media,” which was edited by the founder of Free Press, Robert W. McChesney.

McChesney is an avowed Marxist who has recommended capitalism be dismantled.

He is a professor at the University of Illinois and former editor of the Marxist journal Monthly Review. …

The board of Free Press has included a slew of radicals, such as Obama’s former “green jobs” czar Van Jones, who resigned after it was exposed he founded a communist organization. …

Free Press published a study advocating the development of a “world class” government-run media system in the U.S.

Now the group is pushing a new organization, StopBigMedia.com, that advocates the downfall of “big media” and the creation of new media to “promote local ownership, amplify minority voices, support quality [ie. leftist] journalism, and bring local artists, voices and viewpoints to the airwaves.”

To us it is startling to learn that the far left wants to smash “Big Media” when in our eyes Big Media for the most part bends strongly to their side. But even in the New York Times, MSNBC and so on, occasional anti-left views can be read or heard. That won’t do for totalitarians.

Free Press has ties to other members of the Obama administration.

Obama’s “Internet czar,” Susan P. Crawford, spoke at a Free Press’s May 14, 2009, “Changing Media” summit in Washington, D.C.

Free Press is one of the many organizations funded by George Soros and the Joyce Foundation. (Barack Obama sat on the board of the Joyce Foundation, which is one of many charity foundations hijacked by the radical left.)

More on the Free Press can be found at Discover the Networks, including this:

In November 2003, Free Press organized its first National Conference on Media Reform at the University of Wisconsin-Madison …  Z Magazine [far left radical] reported that this conference prominently featured “El Salvador and Palestine solidarity activists” who “gave updates on their work.”

And this:

While many of its conferences have featured speakers advocating a reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine [more Newspeak], Free Press has focused its efforts on advocating for “net neutrality,” progressive legislation that would allow the government greater regulatory control over the Internet.

Even while its founders and conferences call for revolution, the overthrow of the capitalist system, and the socialization of America, Free Press has been regularly granted audiences not only with members of Congress, but with those overseeing media policy at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). For example, when Julius Genachowski, who worked as a prominent leader in Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, became chairman of the FCC (on June 29, 2009), he promptly appointed Free Press spokeswoman Jen Howard to be his press secretary. By late September, three months into his new job, Genachowski announced his plan to push for net neutrality.

In April 2010, the FCC’s net neutrality bid hit a hurdle when a U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the FCC did not have the right to regulate Comcast’s network management. …

On May 11, 2010, at a Free Press Summit in Washington DC, Democratic Senator Bryon Dorgan gave the keynote speech and declared that critics of net neutrality were simply engaging in the “big lie that permeates public policy today.” He also argued that net neutrality could not be accurately described as a takeover of the Internet, since the Internet was created by the federal government in the first place and already had rules that underpinned net neutrality.

Whatever he meant by “the internet was created by the federal government”, it is worth remembering that the World Wide Web was invented by Sir Timothy Berners-Lee. No innovation comes out of a government-controlled environment. Innovation can only happen where the individual is free. The internet is a sphere of freedom throughout the world, and its existence works strongly against the collectivist tendency that politicians, academics, and all the red-winged minions of the left toil at advancing night and day. And that of course is why these totalitarians want to control it.

Obama delivered a commencement speech at the US Military Academy at West Point which was studded with ironies.

From the Washington Post:

Obama pledged to shape a new “international order” based on diplomacy and engagement.

His presidency has been notable for diplomatic failures and not a single success. As for “engagement”, his obstinate persistence in trying to “engage” Iran has given it all the time it needed to develop nuclear bombs and build the ballistic missiles to deliver them. But a record of failure does not prompt Obama to reconsider his policy.

“Yes, we are clear-eyed about the shortfalls of our international system. But America has not succeeded by stepping outside the currents of international cooperation,” he said. “We have succeeded by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice — so nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities, and face consequences when they don’t.”

Just where has he “steered currents in the direction of liberty and justice”? Where has he got nations that do not “meet their responsibilities” to “face consequences”? Russia invaded Georgia, took and occupied two of its provinces, and Obama has not done a thing about it. What international cooperation has there been to make Russia withdraw?

“The international order we seek is one that can resolve the challenges of our times,” he said in prepared remarks. “Countering violent extremism and insurgency; stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and securing nuclear materials; combating a changing climate and sustaining global growth; helping countries feed themselves and care for their sick; preventing conflict and healing its wounds.”

He may be seeking such an international order, but he’s done nothing to bring it about. Far from “countering violent extremism and insurgency” he refuses even to name the perpetrators of it (Muslims) and the cause they serve (Islam). If he hoped his audience would assume he meant Iraq and Afghanistan, it should be remembered that he was always against the war in Iraq, has shown reluctance to win decisive victory in Afghanistan, and has told the enemy the dates when he’ll withdraw American troops from both battlefields regardless of whether anything that could be called victory has by then been achieved.

On “securing nuclear materials” he held a useless international conference, when Canada and one or two other non-belligerent states promised not to give fissile material to terrorists, but no real danger was eliminated.

And then he comes on to the tired and stupid mantra “combating climate change”. Combating climate? It’s a primitive and ignorant notion. Call in the rainmakers, or cool makers, or warm makers, and let them start their chants!

“Sustaining global growth”? How he feeds the buzz-words (such as “sustaining”) to his far left constituency and at the same time tries to give the impression that he is on the side of prosperity (“global growth”). But his flowery phrasing cannot conceal his lack of understanding.

In Iraq, he said, the United States is “poised” to end its combat operations this summer, leaving behind “an Iraq that provides no safe haven to terrorists; a democratic Iraq that is sovereign, stable and self-reliant.”

Since Obama came to office, there has been far less reporting of terrorist activity in Iraq by the anti-Bush and pro-Obama media. But in fact terrorism in that arrondissement of hell has not stopped. Lately it has intensified. The chances of Iraq becoming stable, “giving no haven to terrorists”, and evolving in this century into a truly democratic state are not worth betting on.

To address the military at all must, he knew, offend the far left constituency to which he long ago sold his soul. Much of his message was aimed at propitiating that radical left rather than reinforcing the morale of American soldiers.

Civilians, he added, must answer the call of service as well, by securing America’s economic future, educating its children and confronting the challenges of poverty and climate change.

His far left critics would understand that when he spoke of “securing America’s economic future” and “confronting the challenges of poverty and climate change” he meant with “green jobs” and redistribution. As for the education of children, they will take it to mean indoctrinating hapless kids with leftist ideology – a cause Obama served actively years ago in Chicago.

Here’s a dry summary of the speech by Arthur Herman in the National Review Online:

On Saturday, Pres. Barack Obama gave a commencement speech … which in effect told the thousand or so soon-to-be second lieutenants that, if he has his way, they’ll soon be out of a job.

Obama outlined for the cadets his vision of a new international order organized around bodies such as the United Nations. In Obama’s future, American military force will give way to American diplomacy joined together with new multilateral partnerships, while “stronger international standards and institutions” will replace unilateral assertion of national interests — including our own. Obama told West Point’s Class of 2010 that he sees them not battling our enemies but “combating a changing climate and sustaining global growth, [and] helping countries feed themselves” even as their citizens achieve their “universal rights.”

He’s still dreaming the dreams of his father.

Redistribution is Socialism. No need to go looking for some dead economist’s definition of the S word. If a central agency with the power of coercion, which is to say a government, takes money from some and distributes it to others, that is Socialism in practice.  The reach of government is widened, individual freedom narrowed.

It should not be called an economic system, because it cannot create wealth. It stultifies innovation and productivity. It kills incentive. It levels down. It is the primrose path to poverty.

Under the leadership of Obama and his gang of collectivists, redistribution is well under way in America. Change to Socialism is well under way.

And Obama’s vision is not just of a socialist America but of a socialist world.

The Investor’s Business Daily comments on how a small, failing, Chicago bank that – inter alia – redistributes US tax-payers’ money to Kenya (the homeland of Obama’s father) is kept going by effort of the redistributionists in the White House.

Sometimes banks are too small to fail, such as when they are in the president’s hometown, deal with the president’s friends and serve the president’s agenda. Or should we perhaps say too connected to fail?

ShoreBank’s Web site boasts: “Van Jones [Obama’s erstwhile ‘Environment Czar’ and admirer of Mao – JB] saves at ShoreBank so his money fights for green jobs just like he does.” …

While President Obama rails against the robber barons of Wall Street, the politically connected Chicago financial institution with a politically correct agenda gets a pass and gets a bailout all its own. It is the poster bank for hope and change.

Fox Business points out that “ShoreBank has ties to the Obama administration. Valerie Jarrett, President Obama’s senior adviser and a fixture in Chicago politics (as was the president), served on the board of Chicago Metropolis 2020, a civic organization which was run by Adele Simmons, a director at ShoreBank.”

ShoreBank was in trouble and needed financial help, either from the government or other financial institutions that have already received government money.

Rep. Judy Biggert, R-Ill., has joined Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., in a letter to Obama asking for records concerning ShoreBank and how it lined up at least  $125 million in capital from major banks to qualify for $75 million from the federal government.

ShoreBank has a history of making the very kind of risky loans that leftist agitators such as Acorn, with government help, pressured banks to do under the Community Reinvestment Act. …

During his visit to Africa last year, Obama praised the bank for its involvement in projects in Kenya.

Kenya? Why is a struggling community bank in the Windy City involved in projects in Kenya? We hesitate to guess.

Ten other Illinois banks have already failed in 2010, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. ShoreBank has reportedly received $20 million from General Electric, $20 million from Goldman Sachs and $20 million from Citigroup — with more promised by JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley.

Considering ShoreBank’s track record, is this where taxpayer money should be going?

Forgive us. We forgot for a moment about that whole sharing the wealth and redistribution thing. …

“I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street,” President Obama said in an interview on the CBS “60 Minutes” program.

He did run to fundamentally transform America — and if those banks are on Main Street and they follow Obama’s agenda, they get help from those fat cats now in thrall to the government, not to mention all the president’s friends. Pretty sweet deal.

There’s a government conspiracy being hatched to put and end to non-governmental “conspiracy theories”.

Fellow bloggers and all who are grateful for the First Amendment – beware! THEY are out to bind and gag us.

Freedom of speech is anathema to Cass Sunstein, one of Obama’s most powerful and most dangerous henchmen. He is Obama’s Information and Regulatory Affairs Czar. He may be deranged (he’s the one who suggested that animals should be allowed to sue people), but this new notion of his should be taken seriously because he speaks for the administration.

Here is part of a report about his plot to end freedom of speech and freedom of the press. It contains an audio clip so you can listen to what he says:

Disturbing audio has emerged of White House information czar Cass Sunstein, who in a previous white paper called for banning “conspiracy theories,” demanding that websites be mandated by law to link to opposing information or that pop ups containing government propaganda be forcibly included on political blogs. …

Sunstein said that if this system couldn’t be implemented voluntarily, “Congress should hold hearings about mandates,” which would legally force people to dilute their own free speech. The Harvard Professor also said that blogs should be forced to list a random draw of 25 popular websites, such as CNN.com.

“The best would be for this to be done voluntarily,” said Sunstein, “But the word voluntary is a little complicated and people sometimes don’t do what’s best for our society,” he added.

“The idea would be to have a legal mandate as the last resort….an ultimate weapon designed to encourage people to do better,” Sunstein concluded.

As we previously reported, in a January 2008 white paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” the Harvard Professor who is currently President Obama’s head of information technology in the White House called for “conspiracy theories,” that is any political opinion which didn’t concur with the establishment view, to be taxed or even banned outright….

In a set of proposals designed to counter “dangerous” ideas, Sunstein suggested that the government could, “ban conspiracy theorizing,” or “impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories”. …

In his white paper, Sunstein …  cited the belief that “global warming is a deliberate fraud” as [a] marginal conspiracy theory to be countered by government censorship. …

Essentially, Sunstein wants it to be written into law that the government can dictate the very nature of reality to Americans and that their opinions can only be voiced at best when accompanied by mandatory federal propaganda or at worst that Americans can be silenced entirely by federal decree.