Karl Rove, writing in the Wall Street Journal, believes that the TEA PARTY movement is significant. We hope he is right, and that it continues and grows. 

An extract (read it all here):  

Yesterday was Tax Day, and it was marked by large numbers of Americans turning out for an estimated 2,000 tea parties across the country. This movement is significant.

In 1978, California voters enacted Prop. 13 in reaction to steep property taxes. That marked the start of a tax-cutting movement that culminated in Ronald Reagan slashing high national income taxes in the 1980s. Now Americans are reacting to runaway government spending that they were not told about before last year’s election, and which Americans are growing to resent.

Derided by elitists as phony, the tea-party movement is spontaneous, decentralized … If it has a father it is CNBC’s Rick Santelli, who called for holding a tea party in Chicago on July 4. Yesterday’s gatherings were made up of people who may never meet again (there’s no central collection point for email addresses). But the concerns driving people to tea parties are real, growing and powerful. Politicians ignore them at their peril.

One concern is the rise of state and local taxes. New York and California passed multibillion-dollar tax increases this year. Other states are considering significant tax hikes or have enacted tax increases in recent years. The many tax and fee increases enacted or under consideration is angering voters.

If that anger persists, it may give Republicans a leg up in the 38 gubernatorial elections over the next two years, as well as in key state legislative races that will determine which party redraws congressional and state legislative districts after the 2010 census. Expect voters to hear a lot about jobs being created in low-tax states in the coming years.

But the center of the debate is in Washington, not the states. The fear of future federal tax hikes is fueling the tea-party movement.

 … of Islam? Well, that’s the reference but …  Obama has five pillars on which to rebuild the US economy. 

In yet another ‘major speech’ – he likes to make them as often as possible among flags and cameras, becoming ever more like all the other dear leaders of the peoples who have centrally-planned economies –  he declared yesterday (in small but central part): 

We must build our house upon a rock.  We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity – a foundation that will move us from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest; where we consume less at home and send more exports abroad.

It’s a foundation built upon five pillars that will grow our economy and make this new century another American century:  new rules for Wall Street that will reward drive and innovation; new investments in education that will make our workforce more skilled and competitive; new investments in renewable energy and technology that will create new jobs and industries; new investments in health care that will cut costs for families and businesses; and new savings in our federal budget that will bring down the debt for future generations.  That is the new foundation we must build.  That must be our future – and my Administration’s policies are designed to achieve that future. 

So the First Pillar is a continuing interference in, and tighter control of the economy by the federal government 

The Second Pillar is reinforced leftist indoctrination in the schools under stricter federal government authority 

The Third Pillar is the provision of insecure and very expensive energy, its uses ever more regulated by the government so that lives become poorer and harder

The Fourth Pillar is the establishment of nationalized healthcare, being a huge extension of the welfare state and the augmentation of  governmental power of decision over the life and death of every individual  

The Fifth Pillar is a fantasy, a pretense, a fairy story that future federal budgets will get smaller and the monstrous deficits  will be ‘halved’ in a blink of the dear leader’s eye.  

 The great essayist Theodore Dalrymple writes in Front Page on the Rosenberg traitors and liberal attitudes towards Communism:  

A recent story in the Guardian confirmed my suspicion of a lingering liberal indulgence toward the former Soviet Union. Headlined ORPHANED BY THE STATE, it consisted of an interview with Robert Rosenberg, the younger son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed by electric chair in 1953 for spying on behalf of the Soviet Union…

Robert and his older brother Michael were eventually adopted by a childless couple, whose name—Meeropol—they now bear. Their childhood was happy; paradoxically, it might have been less happy, or more emotionally confused, had their real parents been imprisoned for a long time instead of executed, for then their adoption might have proven less whole-hearted.

It is hardly surprising that Robert Meeropol, now a lawyer, should have mounted a campaign against the death penalty; you wouldn’t have to be Sigmund Freud to understand why. And again, not surprisingly, Meeropol does not accept that his real parents betrayed him by involving themselves in such activities in the first place, or by refusing to inform on others once arrested. On the contrary, he was proud of them for having stuck up for what they believed in, even going to their deaths for it.

At the end of the interview he says that his parents gave him and his brother Michael “a life in which we can stand up and be ourselves and do the things we believe in.” Earlier, he had drawn a parallel between what his parents did and other people who, even today, commit acts of civil disobedience to further a cause they believe in.

It’s [the interviewer’s] neglecting to ask Meeropol what he thought of his parents’ cause that makes me suspect her of secret sympathy with the Soviet Union. For suppose that the subject of the interview had been the orphan of a couple executed for spying for the Nazis: would the interviewer then have let the question of what they believed in go without comment?… Julius and Ethel Rosenberg supported in theory and aided in practice an ideology and a state that they should have known was responsible for some of the worst oppression and mass murder in history.

In its print edition, the Guardian chose to highlight Robert’s statement, “my parents gave me and Michael a life in which we can stand up and be ourselves,” as a callout, thereby forging an unlikely alliance between Stalinism and psychobabble. Whether standing firm for one’s convictions is a good or bad thing depends on what those convictions are. A monstrous cause is not any the less monstrous because people are ready to die for it; if the history of the twentieth century should have taught us anything, it’s that.

Rather than risk the resentment of horrid little tyrannies, the US State Department will go on funding the development of Iran’s nuclear warfare capability!

Terry Jeffrey’s column about it (read it all here) begins with this startling  revelation:   

American taxpayers not only helped fund Iran’s nuclear program over the past decade, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office, but the State Department now "strongly opposes" diminishing the flow of U.S. money to the international agency that funneled the aid to Iran because the department fears – among other things – that doing so would "anger states in the developing world."

 An absurd report has been issued by the Department of Homeland Security, according to which we conservatives are more dangerous than Islamic terrorists. Michelle Malkin comments

What and who exactly are President Obama’s homeland security officials afraid of these days? If you are a member of an active conservative group that opposes abortion, favors strict immigration         enforcement, lobbies to protect Second Amendment rights, protests big government, advocates federalism or represents veterans who believe in any of the above, the answer is: You. 

Department of Homeland Security Sec. Janet Napolitano has turned her attention away from acts of Islamic jihad on American soil (which she now refers to as "man-caused disasters"). Instead, her department is sounding the alarm over an unquantified "resurgence" in "right-wing extremism activity." On April 7, DHS sent a nine-page warning memo to law enforcement offices across the country titled "Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment."

The report includes a sweeping definition of the threat:

"Right-wing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration."

You cannot ignore the context or the timing of this DHS report. It’s no small coincidence that Napolitano’s agency disseminated the assessment just a week before the nationwide April 15 Tax Day Tea Party protests. The grassroots events organized by fiscal conservatives, independents, Libertarians and, yes, even some Blue Dog Democrats were fueled by the "current economic and political climate" of bipartisan profligate spending and endless taxpayer-funded bailouts. The growing success of the loose-knit movement has invited scorn, ridicule and fear-mongering from Obama’s supporters. Liberal bloggers have likened the Tea Party movement to neo-Nazis, militias and even Weather Underground terrorists… The Obama DHS report is an overarching indictment of conservatives. "Right-wing extremist chatter on the Internet continues to focus on the economy, the perceived loss of U.S. jobs in the manufacturing and construction sectors, and home foreclosures," the assessment warns… 

The report relies on the work of the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center to stir anxiety over "disgruntled military veterans" – a citation that gives us valuable insight into how DHS will define "hate-oriented" groups. The SPLC, you see, has designated the venerable American Legion a "hate group" for its stance on immigration enforcement. The report offers zero data, but states with an almost resentful attitude toward protected free speech: "Debates over appropriate immigration levels and enforcement policy generally fall within the realm of protected political speech under the First Amendment, but in some cases, anti-immigration or strident pro-enforcement fervor has been directed against specific groups and has the potential to turn violent."

"Potential to turn violent"? So did the hysterical fervor whipped up by Capitol Hill over the AIG bonuses, which prompted ugly death threats from across the country. No mention here, though. Not "right wing" enough. Nor will you see Obama DHS warnings to police and sheriff’s departments about … the mob activists of ACORN who have committed burglary, stormed corporate executives’ homes and vowed to conduct "civil disobedience" by "any means necessary" in response to the "current economic and political climate."

If you can redefine dissenting opinion as "hate," you can brand your political opponents as "extremists" – and you can marginalize electoral threats. "Antigovernment"? "Pro-enforcement"? "Disgruntled"? Feeling taxed enough already and "recruiting" and "radicalizing" your friends and neighbors through "chatter on the Internet"?

We are all right-wing extremists now. Welcome to the club.

 We share Mark Steyn’s admiration of the SEALs:

Amid all the relief for the rescue of Captain Phillips, we shouldn’t overlook the SEALs’skill and economy:

The snipers could see two pirates peering out from the back of the enclosed lifeboat and the third pointing his assault rifle at Phillips. President Barack Obama had cleared them to shoot if the captain faced imminent threat of death.

When the order came to shoot, former SEALs said, the hard part was not the distance – about 75 feet, an easy range for an experienced sniper.

The biggest risk came from the many moving parts: the bobbing lifeboat, the rolling ship, hitting three targets simultaneously in darkness.

With deadly accuracy, the snipers fired their rifles in unison. They killed the pirates with exactly three shots.

Amazing.

It’s easy to take the performance of a professional military for granted, as we do every week in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere. But their technical skill has to improve almost in inverse proportion to the faintheartedness of offensive strategy from the political class. When you are, as with piracy and jihad and much else, essentially in permanent reactive mode, your reactions have to be brilliant, every time. Off the Somali coast, they were. But at some point we need a plan for the game.

 From Power Line, on the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips from the Somali pirates, for which Obama –  desperate for a success – is claiming credit:  

The Defense Department sought Obama’s permission to use force against the pirates, and Obama either declined or failed to respond. When the President finally agreed, it was under the most restrictive conditions possible: force could be used only if the captain’s life was "in imminent danger."

I should hope so! It is inconceivable that a President would order the commander on the scene to stand idly by if a hostage’s life was "in imminent danger." What is still unclear, based on early accounts, is whether that condition was actually satisfied. The commanding officer has said that one of the pirates was seen pointing a weapon at Phillips, which satisfied the "imminent danger" standard and caused him to order the snipers to fire.

Perhaps so; I’m happy to take him at his word. (But was Phillips in view? I thought he was tied up, out of sight at the bottom of the boat. No doubt this will be cleared up in time.) But it appears that what triggered the rescue was that all three pirates stuck their heads into view at once, and the commanding officer took advantage of the opportunity by ordering the snipers to fire.

Whether the "imminent danger" standard was satisfied or not, its real effect (and, I suspect, its real purpose) was to give cover to our fledgling President’s rear end. If the affair had turned out badly–as could easily have happened, had the snipers been less accurate–the White House could either have distanced itself from the commander by saying he exceeded his authority, or taken the position that there was no choice but to act because the captain was in "imminent danger."

In fact, the White House gave the most cautious authorization for the use of force that it possibly could have. Obama–like, more significantly, Captain Phillips [a true hero – JB] – was saved by the willingness of the on-scene commander to stick his neck out and the skill of the Navy’s snipers [and Captain Phillips’s own conduct- JB]. 

Obama’s European Progress – during which he bowed deeply to the paymaster of jihad, ‘King’ Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and day after day, in speech after speech, denigrated the country he leads – was an historical landmark, the start in all likelihood of a global catastrophe.

Here’s what the columnist Diana West has written:

An American bow to Saudi Arabia … was calumny on a historic level. King Abdullah, after all, is the head of a state that is the very caricature of modern-day evil, a Sharia dictatorship that fosters religious repression, de facto slavery, subjugation of women, and, not least, the international export of jihad and Sharia through "charities," mosques, madrassas, textbooks, university endowments, Sharia finance and, of course, terrorists, some 15 of whom attacked the United States in 2001. Just last month, Abdullah elevated the delusionally hard-line interior minister Prince Nayef, who long promoted the crackpot theory that Saudis were not involved in 9/11 (it was the Jews, he said), to a direct line of succession to the Saudi throne. Abdullah himself has donated at least $1.35 million to Saudi telethons that raised $174 million for the families of Palestinian suicide bombers from Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. In 2007, Abdullah explicitly denounced the U.S. presence in Iraq as "illegitimate," thus encouraging attacks on Americans in Iraq, where, not incidentally, Saudis are thought to have carried out more suicide bombings than any other nationality. That’s just for starters. In other words, this is not a personage an American president can ever, ever show deference to without besmirching the memories and lives of the American dead and maimed. But that’s just what President Obama did (despite lame claims from the White House that Obama was just shaking hands), making this incident more than a simple gaffe.

She adds:  ‘Obama is the first Muslim-born US president. Could that have something to do with the deepness of the bow?’

And this is how Charles Krauthammer expressed his wonder and offense at the opéra bouffe:

Our president came bearing a basketful of mea culpas. With varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own people for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness, for genocide, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantanamo and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.… It is passing strange for a world leader to celebrate his own country’s decline.  

Nor was it only with gestures and words that the wrecking was done. As North Korea launched a long-range missile of a sort that could carry nuclear warheads all the way to the US, the prince of apologies not only abandoned Japan to its fears of a nuclear-armed enemy in its region, but took away any hope of support in the future by announcing cuts in America’s missile defense, including interceptors expressly designed to shoot North Korean missiles out of the sky. North Korea and Iran are implicitly licensed to continue co-operating on the development of nuclear warheads. The leader of the free world will do nothing to stop them. Worse than that – not only will he take no effective action to prevent the genocidal mullahs of Iran from becoming a nuclear power, he will do his utmost to prevent Israel from  taking such action even though its very existence is at stake.  

On bended knee – figuratively this time – he begged Russia to reduce its nuclear arsenal commensurately with his own proposed reductions, so restoring it – at least in its own self-esteem – to the status of a rival super-power. To what result? Regardless of the flattery, Russia demurred. America was humiliated, but Obama himself was morally elevated, at least in the eyes of his claques, the mobs both outside and inside the US who ecstatically praise his  abasement and weakening of  the only true superpower, of which Obama himself incredibly and tragically is the president.

On he went to Iraq. The comparative freedom won there by years of American effort and sacrifice was not of sufficient concern to him to elicit any commitment to preserve it when he made his stop-over call. What will Iraq do, where will it look for support, when Iran threatens it with nuclear weapons?     

Nations that have put their trust in America for their freedom or sheer survival have seen their erstwhile protector turn its back on them and smile encouragingly at their enemies: the tyrants, totalitarians, and jihadists. Japan, India, Israel, Iraq, Poland, Georgia, the Ukraine, the Czech Republic, the Baltic States, Taiwan need new alliances, new means of defense. The United Sates is deserting them. Oppressed minorities in Asia, Africa, and South America must cast aside any hope they had that the hitherto greatest defender of freedom might ever again lift a finger to save them.

Here’s what Caroline Glick, columnist for the Jerusalem Post, has to say, in perhaps an over-sanguine state of mind:

[Vice-president] Biden …  made clear that from the administration’s perspective, an Israeli strike that prevents Iran from becoming a nuclear power is less acceptable than a nuclear-armed Iran. That is, the Obama administration prefers to see Iran become a nuclear power than to see Israel secure its very existence. America’s betrayal of its democratic allies makes each of them more vulnerable to aggression at the hands of their enemies – enemies the Obama administration is now actively attempting to appease. And as the US strengthens their adversaries at their expense, these spurned democracies must consider their options for surviving as free societies in this new, threatening, post-American environment. For the most part, America’s scorned allies lack the ability to defeat their enemies on their own. India cannot easily defeat nuclear-armed Pakistan, which itself is fragmenting into disparate anti-Indian nuclear-wielding Islamist and Islamist-supporting factions. Japan today cannot face North Korea – which acts as a Chinese proxy – on its own without risking a confrontation with China. Russia’s invasion of Georgia last August showed clearly that its former republics and satellites have no way of escaping Moscow’s grip alone… And the Obama administration’s intense efforts to woo Iran coupled with its plan to slash the US’s missile defense programs – including those in which Israel participates – and reportedly pressure Israel to dismantle its own purported nuclear arsenal – make clear that Israel today stands alone against Iran. The risks that the newly inaugurated post-American world pose for America’s threatened friends are clear. But viable opportunities for survival do exist, and Israel can and must play a central role in developing them. Specifically, Israel must move swiftly to develop active strategic alliances with Japan, Iraq, Poland, and the Czech Republic and it must expand its alliance with India. With Israel’s technological capabilities, its intelligence and military expertise, it can play a vital role in shoring up these countries’ capacities to contain the rogue states that threaten them. And by containing the likes of Russia, North Korea and Pakistan, they will make it easier for Israel to contain Iran even in the face of US support for the mullahs. The possibilities for strategic cooperation between and among all of these states and Israel run the gamut from intelligence sharing to military training, to missile defense, naval development, satellite collaboration, to nuclear cooperation.

How would it have been if Obama had not deserted these countries? Cliff May suggests:  

A thought experiment: Suppose North Korea’s Taepo Dong-2 missile had been launched – and then been knocked out of the sky by an American, Japanese or South Korean missile defense system. Kim would have been hopping mad. The Russians, Chinese, Iranians, Syrians and others … might have given some hard thought to whether it makes sense to devote time and resources to developing nuclear weapons and missile systems that the U.S. and its allies will have the resolve and the ability to neutralize. In fact, the U.S. and Japan did have Aegis destroyers tracking the North Korean missile. Some of those ships carried missile interceptors that could have brought down the North Korean missile. A decision was made not to do so.

What moves Obama? Is it all just for his own personal aggrandizement? He seems to crave adulation, and he got plenty of it from worshippers in every country he visited; immense applause from happy-clappy fans, including the journalists who have unapologetically abandoned any pretense of objectivity or respect for the truth in the throes of their mindless crush.

But beneath the vanity, the posing, the holding-forth, the charm offensive, the performance, there is surely a deep-seated desire , planted in him from his earliest youth, reinforced by his education and his lefty buddies in Chicago, to see America demoted, the cruel Third World appeased, the rich made poor, the successful brought low, a socialist leveling, an all-controlling government, and an end to the impudence of liberty.    

America has elected its own willful destroyer. An astounding thing. 

An act of terrorism by Muslim university students, that would have killed and maimed many in the UK this Easter, has fortunately been prevented by timely detection and arrests.  

Michael Burleigh comments in the Mail (read the whole column here):  

The fact is that universities are one of the bastions of multiculturalism in Britain – and although the Government knows that this discredited policy has been disastrous for this country, it is still too nervous of the Left to abandon one of their holy grails.

Multiculturalism ostensibly celebrates individual ethnic ‘identities’ but it has been given such emphasis that each minority identity – ‘Black’, ‘Muslim’ or any other – is all too often encouraged to air a sense of grievance and victimhood, while the majority population are cast in the role of oppressors.

And for years now, terrorist recruiting sergeants – aided and abetted by a greedy liberal lawyers’ racket which encourages people to emphasise their rights rather than their duties and obligations as citizens – have exploited the multicultural havens of universities to persuade those who do feel victimised by society to try to get their own back with bombs and violence.

But if the universities are now one of the main breeding grounds of Islamist terrorism, the terrorists targets are not so rarefied… The 12 men arrested in the North-West on Wednesday … may have been plotting a mass casualty attack on nightclubs frequented by footballers this Easter weekend.

It is time now for us all to ask how long the Government is going to tolerate universities as breeding grounds for the terrorists who seek to kill innocent Britons during the most solemn holiday in the Christian calendar [or at any other time – JB].

There is only one way to tackle this deeply and dangerously ingrained problem: The Government should urgently and unequivocally abandon the multicultural creed that has allowed extremists to flourish in this country.

Sure it should. But it’s almost certainly too late. The ideology of Islam is wholly incompatible with the values of the West, but the immigrant Muslim population of Britain and Western Europe is growing while the indigenous populations are dying out.  It will not be long before Europe is an Islamic continent. 

One thing that could be done before it is too late (but will not be done of course) is – bring the European leftist ideologues, Arab-loving romantics, and Islam-besotted idiots (like Prince Charles) who actively or by sentimental encouragement opened the doors of Europe to the Muslims, to trial for treason. 

O, but – I nearly forgot – British judges are among the most guilty.