For everything that is going wrong for America, John McCain must share the blame, along with the ignorant, incompetent, petty-mindedly vengeful, Alinsky-marinated Chicago clique now in the White House.

Barack Obama was not presidential material, and some of us – some tens of millions of us in all probability – believe he won the election because John McCain let him win. Not intentionally, but foolishly.

This was how he did it. The voters were kept ignorant about Obama by the deliberate choice of those whose job it was to inform them. McCain, and McCain alone, was in a position to bypass the highly partisan media and tell the country, every time he stood before the TV cameras and addressed tens of millions of attentive ears, just whom Obama’s political faction consisted of: subversives, such as, most prominently, the America-hating terrorist-supporting Jeremiah Wright, pastoral leader of thousands, and the actual terrorist Bill Ayers,  ‘educator’ (read indoctrinator) of generations of children.

But McCain chose not to do it.

Why he chose not to do it must remain forever among the darkest of dark mysteries to those who suppose he had a reason. Only those of us see the light who believe that McCain – undoubted hero and patriot that he is, man of extraordinary courage and endurance – was simply not savvy enough to play the cards he held, and was surrounded by advisers who were also not good at thinking, or just didn’t think.

An innumerable portion of us among the tens of millions knew from the moment McCain was chosen as the Republican candidate (instead of the eminently electable Mitt Romney) – yes, from that very second – that the election was lost. It was then that our hearts sank, not to rise again on the helium of hope until very recently. (The hope, expressed at vast tea-parties, is that Obama can yet be stopped from steering the ship of state on to the rocks.)

The one person in his campaign who could and did think, had all the political astuteness necessary to use the ammunition available to win the fight, was Sarah Palin.

In her book, Going Rogue, she relates how she wanted to raise the damning facts about Obama but was ‘told to sit down and shut up’. Eventually she was reluctantly allowed by ‘headquarters’ to touch on his ‘associations with questionable characters’  but only in the form of a ‘sound bite written into a rally speech’, about Obama ‘palling around with terrorists’ (pages 306-307). One gathers that her will in this matter, as in others, was snaffled and curbed almost to impotence. She does not blame McCain, she is consistently respectful of him, but after reading her account we can and should blame him.

Slight and mild as the little stabbing sound-bite was, ‘the left went nuts, accusing me of lowdown rhetoric unworthy of presidential politics’. (Remember the cruel, lowdown, untrue things the left said about her that they must have deemed worthy of presidential politics?)

But of course the opposition reacted like that. The little stab went home. They knew her reference was potent against them. They feared that if it were made much of, if it were to be emphasized, repeated, insisted upon, their candidate was sunk.

So did McCain read the signs aright and follow up the small victory? Not he. It was always, it seems, more important to McCain to be perceived as a gentleman than that he should win the election for his party, its principles, and its policies. May he long bask in a complacent gentlemanliness as the country endures the consequences of his choice!

His whole organization aided him in making it. ‘Although,’ Palin writes, ‘it was headquarters that had issued the sound bite, the folks there did little more than duck’ when the left reacted with its whining and insolent abuse.

If Palin had been allowed to say whatever she knew needed to be said, or even better if she had been the one to plan the tactics of the campaign, it is possible that McCain would have won. He would most likely not have made a good president, but he couldn’t be as bad as Obama.

If Palin were ever to run her own campaign, signs are she would know how to do it. The autobiographer of Going Rogue emerges from the pages as not only competent, commonsensical, brave, honest, strong, unselfish, knowing her own worth without vanity, but also a born leader, a conservative who understands and shares the values that made America great, and a natural politician who at the same time is a person of integrity. A very rare phenomenon!

The Republican party should appreciate that her exceptional abilities are gifts to it, assets to be grateful for, and should help her make the most of them.

Jillian Becker   November 28, 2009

Senator Chris Dodd, one of the gang still at large that caused the housing bubble and the consequent collapse of the global economy, is also answerable for the Livable Communities Act, which prescribes:

• Where you must live. – In a tightly packed urban ‘community’.

• How you must live. – For instance, how warm your house and water can be. Big Daddy can easily control this by a device fitted to your thermostat that will hold it to an approved degree. You will be monitored for cheating. Your heating in winter and cooling in summer may be switched off completely ‘to save energy’ without your being consulted or even notified. California is a pioneer in this particular leap forward.

• Where you may work. – Near enough for you to get there by walking, biking, or taking a ride on a bus if you must.

• How you may get about. – By foot, bicycle, wheelchair, scooter, skates, or bus if you must. But not by your own car. To do that is to waste fuel and spoil the atmosphere, and so to darken your soul with the worst of sins in the new religion of environmentalism: harming the environment. This will soon be not only a sin but a crime.

You can read the Livable Communities Act, number S.1619, at Thomas.loc.gov.

And you can enjoy a discussion of it by witty people who share your disgust at PajamasTV here.

Barack Obama’s autobiographical book Dreams from My Father is a quietly self-vaunting ‘tell-all’ mixture of narrative, nostalgia, apparent confession, disguised complaint and unfocussed accusation. As the self-portrait of a young man it is fondly self-indulgent, allowing a few small warts – or perhaps one should say acne spots – to show, just enough to deflect accusations of self-flattery. It emerges from the narrative, rather than it is said, that the young Obama resented being black. He implies that someone must be to blame for his having to feel like that. The self-pity is kept, however, as subdued as the self-flattery.

The story wears a candid expression on its face, so to speak, but gives itself away by inevitably raising questions which beg for answers not given. For instance, and significantly, Obama does not say who paid him to work as a ‘community organizer’, or why. A man, an ‘organizer’, named Marty Kaufman phones him out of the blue, meets him at a coffee shop and offers him the undefined job for a rather low wage. What this man’s interest in the work might be is not explained, other than that he’s been vaguely idealistic ever since the student protest movement of the 1960s. One is left to assume that this fellow ‘in a rumpled suit’, although he shows no signs of having disposable funds of his own, is some sort of selfless philanthropist nobly intent on alleviating difficult living conditions for the poor black tenants of a crumbling building in a seedy area of Chicago.

Now the truth is out. David Horowitz is providing the answer.

Since taking office Barack Obama, who promised during his campaign to create a moderate, inclusive administration, has engaged in actions that have created division and fear because they are meant to radically change America, not improve on what has always worked.  As a result, David Horowitz writes in Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model, “Many Americans have gone from hopefulness, through unease, to a state of alarm as the President shows a radical side only partly visible during his campaign.”

Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model provides an understanding of the roots of the current administration’s effort to subject America to a wholesale transformation by looking at the work of one of the President’s heroes — radical Chicago “community organizer” Saul Alinsky.  The guru of Sixties radicals, Alinsky urged his followers to be flexible and opportunistic and say anything to get power, which they can then use to destroy the existing society and its economic system.  Alinsky died in 1972, but left behind an organization in Chicago dedicated to his malicious ideas.  This team hired Barack Obama in 1986 when he was 23 and taught him how to organize for radical transformation.

In this insightful new booklet, Horowitz discusses Alinsky’s work in the 60s — and his advice to radicals to seize any weapon to advance their cause.  This became the philosophy of Alinskyite organizations such as ACORN and to Alinsky disciple Van Jones, a self described “communist” who served as President Obama’s “Green Czar” until he was forced to resign when his extremist ideas became public.

After his analysis of Saul Alinsky, Horowitz points out what the grandfather of “social organizing” created “is not salvation but chaos.” Then he asks the crucial question: “And presidential disciples of Alinsky, what will they create?”

Obama’s puerile, sentimental, ignorant foreign policy weakens and potentially endangers America, but more immediate calamity threatens from his domestic policies.

At the Commentary-contentions website, Peter Wehner  writes:

In a front-page Washington Post story today — headlined “Angry Congress lashes out at Obama” — we read this:

Growing discontent over the economy and frustration with efforts to speed its recovery boiled over Thursday on Capitol Hill in a wave of criticism and outright anger directed at the Obama administration. Episodes in both houses of Congress exposed the raw nerves of lawmakers flooded with stories of unemployment and economic hardship back home.

What is happening is that the myriad troubling signs for Obama over the past several months — crumbling support for his health-care efforts, a huge loss of support among independents, a dispirited base, an energized opposition, growing approval of the GOP’s agenda — are now manifesting themselves in election results (see the Virginia and New Jersey governors’ races) and unhappiness among Democrats on Capitol Hill. …

Obama’s signature domestic initiative, health care, is deeply unpopular. Unemployment is above 10 percent and won’t be dropping significantly any time soon. The issues the country is focused on are ones that play to the advantage of the GOP. The nation is becoming more conservative in the Age of Obama. His party is increasingly nervous and restive as its members see what awaits them in 2010. … It wasn’t supposed to be this hard for liberalism’s “sort of God,” was it?

And this is only the beginning. As long as Obama is in power, things can only get worse.  If Wehner is right that Obama is making the nation more conservative in reaction, then the rescue posse might get here in the nick of time. But a terrible lot of – maybe irreparable – damage will have been done by then.

Does Obama have some urgent need of Bob Bauer (husband of Anita Dunn, the fan of Mao)?

Maybe this, from The Hill, has something to do with his appointment:

The lawyer’s hiring, announced this morning shortly after Greg Craig officially resigned the post, was also an attempt by the White House to deflect any fallout that may arise from an ACORN investigation currently underway in Louisiana, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) added in a statement.

“Bob Bauer has a public record of defending Barack Obama’s relationship with ACORN,”  the congressman told supporters. “Bauer’s hiring appears to be a tactical maneuver to strategically defend the White House exactly one week after Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell raided ACORN’s national headquarters in New Orleans and seized paper records and computer hard drives that may lead to the White House.”

From The Heritage Foundation:

A report released Friday by the non-partisan and independent Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency in charge of running Medicare and Medicaid, blows the lid off of every one of Obama’s claims. All of the following quotes are from the report itself:

Health Care Costs Increase: “In aggregate, we estimate that for calendar years 2010 through 2019 [national health expenditures (NHE)] would increase by $289 billion, or 0.8 percent, over the updates baseline projection that was released on June 29, 2009.” In other words, Obamacare bends the cost curve up, not down.

Millions Lose Existing Private Coverage: “However, a number of workers who currently have employer coverage would likely become enrolled in the expanded Medicaid program or receive subsidized coverage through the Exchange. For example, some smaller employers would be inclined to terminate their existing coverage, and companies with low average salaries might find it to their – and their employees’ – advantage to end their plans … We estimate that such actions would collectively reduce the number of people with employer-sponsored health coverage by about 12 million.” In other words, Obamacare will cause millions of Americans to lose their existing private coverage.

Millions Pay Fines Yet Remain Uncovered: “18 million are estimated to choose not to be insured and to pay the penalty associated with the individual mandate. For the most part, these would be individuals with relatively low health care expenses for whom the individual or family insurance premium would be significantly in excess of the penalty and their anticipated health benefit value.” In other words, 18 million Americans will either face jail time or be forced to pay a new tax they will receive no benefit from.

Millions Lose Medicare Advantage: “Section 1161 of Division B of H.R. 3962 would set Medicare Advantage capitation benchmarks … We estimate that in 2014 when the MA provisions would be fully phased in, enrollment in MA plans would decreased by 64 percent (from its projected level of 13.2 million under current law to 4.7 million under the proposal).” In other words, 8.5 million seniors who currently get such services as coor dinated care for chronic conditions, routine eye and hearing examinations, and preventive-care services would lose their existing private coverage.

Millions Placed on Welfare: “Of the additional 34 million who are estimated to be insured in 2019 as a result of H.R. 3962, about three-fifths (21 million) would receive Medicaid coverage due to the expansion of eligibility to those adults under 150 percent of the FPL.” In other words, more than half the people who gain health insurance will receive it through the welfare program Medicaid. 

Seniors Access to Care Jeopardized: “H.R. 3962 would introduce permanent annual productivity adjustments to price updates for institutional providers… Over time, a sustained reduction in payment updates, based on productivity expectations that are difficult to attain, would cause Medicare payment rates to grow more slowly than and in a way that was unrelated to, the providers’ costs of furnishing services to beneficiaries. Thus, providers for whom Medicare constitutes a substantive portion of their business could find it difficult to remain profitable and might end their participation in the program (possibly jeopardizing access to care for beneficiaries).” In other words, the Medicare cuts in the House bill are so out of touch with reality that hospitals currently serving Medicare patients might be forced to stop doing so. Thus making it much more difficult for seniors to get health care.

Poor’s Access Problems Exacerbated: “In practice, supply constraints might interfere with providing the services by the additional 34 million insured persons. …providers might tend to accept more patients who have private insurance (with relatively attractive payment rates) and fewer Medicaid patients, exacerbating existing access problems for the latter group.” In other words, those 21 million people who are gaining health insurance through Medicaid are going to have a very tough time finding a doctor who will treat them.

…  in Western democracies.

From the Heritage Foundation:

Last month when the White House released its visitor log for the first six months of the Obama presidency, one name appeared far more often than any other: Service Employee International Union (SEIU) President Andrew Stern. Stern has every right to expect to be welcome in the Obama White House. He has repeatedly bragged about the fact that under his leadership, the SEIU spent $60.7 million to elect Barack Obama president. And what is Stern buying with his $60.7 million besides White House tours? Ever expanding federal government programs and state government bailouts which are rapidly bankrupting our country.

Unlike his predecessor, John Sweeney, who came up the ranks after starting with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, Stern entered the labor movement when the SEIU organized his shop when he was working as a welfare case worker for the State of Pennsylvania. Stern’s public sector entrance into labor is by no means an anomaly. In fact, for the first time ever in American history, preliminary estimates of union membership for 2009 show that most union members now work for either the local, state, or federal government.

Heritage scholar James Sherk has the numbers: “The overall unionization rate between January and September 2009 stood at 12.4%, unchanged from last year. However, this difference masks a large difference between unions in the private and public sectors. Union membership has fallen to 7.3% of private sector workers – the lowest rate since Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act into law. But it is a completely different story in the public sector: 37.6% of government employees belong to unions, up almost a percentage point since last year. Those 7.9 million unionized government employees are 51% of all union members nationwide.”

The days when “union member” meant an American working in a steel plant, or coal mine, or auto factory are gone. Today, unions are dependent on government, not the private sector, for their livelihood. Therefore, unions like the SEIU have little interest in private sector job growth. Private sector jobs don’t help fund $60.7 million political campaigns. But government jobs do. The change in incentives has been devastating to American taxpayers. Manhattan Institute senior fellow Steven Malanga explains why:

In the private sector … employers who are too generous with pay and benefits will be punished. In the public sector, however, more union members means more voters. And more voters means more dollars for political campaigns to elect sympathetic politicians who will enact higher taxes to foot the bill for the upward arc of government spending on workers.

From Newsmax:

Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, tells Newsmax that the White House intervened to keep him from obtaining critical information regarding the Fort Hood murders. …

Rep. Hoekstra charged in a statement on Monday that the Obama administration was withholding information and demanded that the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Director of National Intelligence preserve documents relating to the incident for use in any future investigation.

“On Friday afternoon I asked the director of national intelligence [Dennis Blair] to get a briefing,” Hoekstra said. “We were already starting to hear that Major Hasan had some connection back to the Middle East, perhaps some jihadist link, and I just asked the DNI: Would you share with me the information you have available at this time?

“He indicated that he would give me a call back and let me know. He contacted me on Saturday and said, I think we’re going to make this work. A couple of hours later he called back and said, between the lines, I’ve been overruled by the White House. There will be no briefing for you this weekend, and early next week on Tuesday we’ll give you a briefing.

“Well, there was no reason why we couldn’t be briefed on the information they had at that time. I get suspicious when they don’t give us the information that we’re looking for, especially when they’re going to give it to us in a very limited form, perhaps only to me and the chairman of the whole committee. That’s when my suspicions were raised.

“Now [Monday] night they did come back and brief my staff and some senators on what they knew about Major Hasan and when they knew it, but it was already after most of this information had somehow been leaked to the media.”

As to why the administration might want to withhold information, Hoekstra said: “There are serious questions about whether the FBI did everything appropriately and whether there was enough information out there, enough red flags out there, that reasonable people would have assumed Hasan should have been more closely evaluated than he was.

“I don’t know if that’s it or not, and I won’t know or have a better idea until I’ve had access to all the information…

“I’ve just made it very clear that I want them to preserve all the documents, all the information that deals with Major Hasan, because I want to make sure that we don’t get to a point where, well, we can’t find that information anymore. I want a full, thorough investigation. …

“You need to put together the whole picture. The whole picture is that it appears he had contact with overseas jihadists, including perhaps people connected with al-Qaida. He made presentations and statements to his colleagues here in the United States that would lead one to believe he might have jihadist tendencies.

“Did all of this information ever collect in one place and give us a thorough insight into who he was? Or did the intelligence community have part of it, the Army have part of it, and was it stored in three or four different places so that it never came together to provide one coherent picture of who Hasan might be and who he might become?”

Asked why the Army did not act against Hasan based on the information it reportedly had, Hoekstra said “what we have seen during this administration is a certain political correctness that just makes many of us uncomfortable. 

“It was only a few months ago that the secretary of homeland security said we’re not going to use the term ‘terrorism’ anymore. We’re going to call it ‘manmade disasters.’

“The bottom line here is that if we are unwilling to call terrorism terrorism, we will never be able to deal with it, confront it, contain it, and defeat it.”

You think you own your body?

Well, you don’t.

How can you be so selfish, so acquisitive, so greedy as to want to claim permanent possession of it?

You have no moral claim to it whatsoever. Any more than to any other private property.

As Proudhon said: ‘Property is theft.’

Or at most a loan.

You’ve only got your body on loan from the community.

Not only must it be returned to common ownership after your death, but bits of it can be taken away from you while you’re still alive.

So says Obama’s ‘regulatory czar’, Cass Sunstein.  He proposes the ‘routine removal’ of human organs from the dead, because ‘the state owns the rights to body parts of people who are dead or in certain hopeless conditions, and it can remove their organs without asking anyone’s permission.’

The left passionately desires to reduce the First World to the level of the Third World and destroy the nation state. That is the ideal in the minds of Obama and his henchmen, and it explains his foreign policy.

It is the ideal of the British Labour Party. Throughout their long years in power, that socialist cabal worked to achieve the destruction of Britain, and they have succeeded to such a degree that the damage is probably irreversible. They’ve done it by admitting Third World immigrants in massive numbers.

Melanie Phillips writes:

So now the cat is well and truly out of the bag. For years, as the number of immigrants to Britain shot up apparently uncontrollably, the question was how exactly this had happened.

Was it through a fit of absent-mindedness or gross incompetence? Or was it not inadvertent at all, but deliberate?

The latter explanation seemed just too outrageous. After all, a deliberate policy of mass immigration would have amounted to nothing less than an attempt to change the very make-up of this country without telling the electorate.

There could not have been a more grave abuse of the entire democratic process. Now, however, we learn that this is exactly what did happen. The Labour government has been engaged upon a deliberate and secret policy of national cultural sabotage.

This astonishing revelation surfaced quite casually last weekend in a newspaper article by one Andrew Neather. He turns out to have been a speech writer for Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.

And it was he who wrote a landmark speech in September 2000 by the then immigration minister, Barbara Roche, that called for a loosening of immigration controls. But the true scope and purpose of this new policy was actively concealed.

In its 1997 election manifesto, Labour promised ‘firm control over immigration’ and in 2005 it promised a ‘crackdown on abuse’. In 2001, its manifesto merely said that the immigration rules needed to reflect changes to the economy to meet skills shortages.

But all this concealed a monumental shift of policy. For Neather wrote that until ‘at least February last year’, when a new points-based system was introduced to limit foreign workers in response to increasing uproar, the purpose of the policy Roche ushered in was to open up the UK to mass immigration.

This has been achieved. Some 2.3million migrants have been added to the population since 2001. Since 1997, the number of work permits has quadrupled to 120,000 a year.

Unless policies change, over the next 25 years some seven million more will be added to Britain’s population, a rate of growth three times as fast as took place in the Eighties.

Such an increase is simply unsustainable. Britain is already one of the most overcrowded countries in Europe. But now look at the real reason why this policy was introduced, and in secret. The Government’s ‘driving political purpose’, wrote Neather, was ‘to make the UK truly multicultural’.

It was therefore a politically motivated attempt by ministers to transform the fundamental make-up and identity of this country. It was done to destroy the right of the British people to live in a society defined by a common history, religion, law, language and traditions.

It was done to destroy for ever what it means to be culturally British and to put another ‘multicultural’ identity in its place. And it was done without telling or asking the British people whether they wanted their country and their culture to be transformed in this way.

Spitefully, one motivation by Labour ministers was ‘to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.

Even Neather found that particular element of gratuitous Left-wing bullying to be ‘a manoeuvre too far’.

Yet apart from this, Neather sees nothing wrong in the policy he has described. Indeed, the reason for his astonishing candour is he thinks it’s something to boast about. Mass immigration, he wrote, had provided the ‘foreign nannies, cleaners and gardeners’ without whom London could hardly function.

What elitist arrogance! As if most people employ nannies, cleaners and gardeners. And what ignorance. The argument that Britain is better off with this level of immigration has been conclusively shown to be economically illiterate.

Neather gave the impression that most immigrants are Eastern Europeans. But these form fewer than a quarter of all immigrants. [Most are Muslim – JB]

And the fact is that, despite his blithe assertions to the contrary, schools in areas of very high immigration find it desperately difficult to cope with so many children who don’t even have basic English. Other services, such as health or housing, are similarly being overwhelmed by the sheer weight of numbers.

But the most shattering revelation was that this policy of mass immigration was not introduced to produce nannies or cleaners for the likes of Neather. It was to destroy Britain’s identity and transform it into a multicultural society where British attributes would have no greater status than any other country’s.

A measure of immigration is indeed good for a country. But this policy was not to enhance British culture and society by broadening the mix. It was to destroy its defining character altogether. …

They were, he wrote, reluctant to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all to Labour’s core white working class vote. So they deliberately kept it secret.

They knew that if they told the truth about what they were doing, voters would rise up in protest. So they kept it out of their election manifestos. …

For years [Britons] have watched as their country’s landscape has been transformed out of all recognition — and that politicians from all mainstream parties have told them first that it isn’t happening and second, that they are racist bigots to object even if it is.

Now the political picture has been transformed overnight by the unguarded candour of Andrew Neather’s eye-opening superciliousness. For now we know that Labour politicians actually caused this to happen – and did so out of total contempt for their own core voters. …