The Roman Senator, Cato the Elder, repeated and repeated, in every speech he made, no matter what his subject was, and however irrelevant the iteration:

‘Carthago delenda est!’ –  ‘Carthage must be destroyed’  – until it eventually was destroyed  by Rome in 146 B.C.

He set an example for us. We must repeat and repeat:

The United Nations must be destroyed!

It should be shouted at every protest rally;  written on placards and carried high;   printed on T-shirts; emblazoned on billboards.

The UN must be destroyed!

It is a den of despots, a coven of conspiracy, the engine of evil.

Watch this week as Qaddafi of Libya, Ahmadinejad of Iran and all the other monstrous tyrants gather at the UN to spew their poison.

The International Socialists want to develop the UN into a World Government. They are proposing a universal currency to be issued by the United Nations. They propose United Nations regulation of financial institutions world-wide. They propose that the United Nations enforce controls over the lives of people in all countries to ‘protect the planet’. They propose, in other words, global totalitarianism.

And if the United Nations should became the Kremlin of the whole planet, who might be craving to be its supremo, its Stalin?

Can we think of his name?  Yes, we can.

And we must not let this happen.

UN DELENDA EST!

THE UN MUST BE DESTROYED!

From Redstate:

You are probably not surprised to find that Poland and the Czech Republic are not the only loyal and faithful American allies getting screwed by the Obama Administration these days. The ongoing drama in Honduras is an outrage and a disgrace, but not because the Hondurans have done anything wrong. It’s because the Obama administration is actively intervening on behalf of a thug would-be dictator whom the Hondurans properly and legally drove from power.

Shame on you, Barack.

Follow closely, because this is an extremely important and telling example of the kind of foreign policy we are getting from Barack Obama. Let’s review what’s been going on in Honduras this year, and how the Obama administration has come down completely on the side of tyrants, cheaters, and marxists They’ve done it deliberately, and in keeping with their overall global policy of rejecting freedom and snuggling up to the thugs and bandits of the world [remember Iranian protesters after the fraud election? remember soldiers shooting them? remember Obama’s reaction?]…

Honduras is one of the most impoverished countries in central America, but it has been and remains a democratic republic in a region currently overshadowed by several evil dictators who are intent on spreading the evils of drug-money fueled marxism and tyranny to the entire region: Fidel & Raul Castro of Cuba, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, and most of all, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. [A cynic like me might add Daniel Ortega in neighboring Nicaragua to the list, as he’s lobbying to change their constitution to allow him to run for president again.]

Morales, Correa, and Chavez were ALL elected in free elections, then seized power by one means or another, and turned republics into their personal tin-pot dictatorships. In the crisis currently underway, Zelaya tried to do the same thing…

Read the rest of it here.

There is serious trouble ahead among the nations as a result of Obama putting away American power as he creates a weak, poor, socialist state out of what has long been the strongest and most successful country in history.

Mark Steyn comments accurately on Obama’s ever more disastrous foreign policy (read all of what he writes here):

You’ve got to figure that by now the world’s strongmen are getting the measure of the new Washington… The Europeans “negotiate” with Iran over its nukes for years, and, in the end, Iran gets the nukes, and Europe gets to feel good about itself for having sat across the table talking to no good purpose for the best part of a decade. In Moscow, there was a palpable triumphalism in the news that the Russians had succeeded in letting the Obama fellow have their way. “This [the breaking of the promise by the US to provide  anti-missile shields to Poland and the Czech Republic] is a recognition by the Americans of the rightness of our arguments about the reality of the threat or, rather, the lack of one,” said Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Duma’s international affairs committee. “Finally the Americans have agreed with us.”

There’ll be a lot more of that in the years ahead.

There is no discreetly arranged “Russian concession.” Moscow has concluded that a nuclear Iran is in its national interest – especially if the remorseless nuclearization process itself is seen as a testament to Western weakness. Even if the Israelis are driven to bomb the thing to smithereens circa next spring, that, too, would only emphasize, by implicit comparison, American and European pusillanimity. Any private relief felt in the chancelleries of London and Paris would inevitably license a huge amount of public tut-tutting by this or that foreign minister about the Zionist Entity’s regrettable “disproportion.” The U.S. defense secretary is already on record as opposing an Israeli strike. If it happens, every thug state around the globe will understand the subtext – that, aside from a tiny strip of land [on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean], every other advanced society on earth is content to depend for its security on the kindness of strangers.

Some of them very strange. Kim Jong-il wouldn’t really let fly at South Korea or Japan, would he? Even if some quasi-Talibanny types wound up sitting on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, they wouldn’t really do anything with them, would they? OK, Putin can be a bit heavy-handed when dealing with Eastern Europe, and his definition of “Eastern” seems to stretch ever further west, but he’s not going to be sending the tanks back into Prague and Budapest, is he? I mean, c’mon …

Vladimir Putin is no longer president but he is de facto czar. And he thinks it’s past time to reconstitute the old empire – not formally (yet), but certainly as a sphere of influence from which the Yanks keep their distance. President Obama has just handed the Russians their biggest win since the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Indeed, in some ways it marks the restitching of the Iron Curtain. When the Czechs signed their end of the missile-defense deal in July, they found themselves afflicted by a sudden “technical difficulty” that halved their gas supply from Russia. The Europe Putin foresees will be one not only ever more energy-dependent on Moscow but security-dependent, too – in which every city is within range of missiles from Tehran and other crazies, and is, in effect, under the security umbrella of the new czar. As to whether such a Continent will be amicable to American interests, well, good luck with that, hopeychangers.

In a sense, the health care debate and the foreign policy debacle are two sides of the same coin: For Britain and other great powers, the decision to build a hugely expensive welfare state at home entailed inevitably a long retreat from responsibilities abroad, with a thousand small betrayals of peripheral allies along the way. A few years ago, the great scholar Bernard Lewis warned, during the debate on withdrawal from Iraq, that America risked being seen as “harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.” In Moscow and Tehran, on the one hand, and Warsaw and Prague, on the other, they’re drawing their own conclusions.

John Perazzo writes at Front Page Magazine (please read it all here):

The Apollo Alliance, which helped craft portions of the $787 billion “stimulus” legislation that the President signed into law in early 2009, exerts a powerful influence on the environmental views and policies of the Obama administration. Specifically, the Alliance had a hand in writing the “clean energy and green-collar jobs provisions” of the bill, for which $86 billion was earmarked. Apollo Alliance’s name gained some notoriety in recent weeks because of its ties to Van Jones, the communist revolutionary who resigned his post as Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar” during Labor Day weekend. But there is another highly noteworthy Jones – Jeff Jones (no relation) – who also holds a lofty post with the Apollo Alliance, and who, as such, also has the ear of the President. Remarkably, Jeff, like Van, also has a history as a communist revolutionary – with longstanding, intimate ties to domestic terrorism, no less.

Today Jeff Jones is director of the Apollo Alliance’s New York State chapter… .

In 1965 Jones joined the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and became active as an anti-war speaker on college campuses. In April 1967 he quit school to become the regional office coordinator of New York City’s SDS chapter, a position he held until December 1968. SDS supported America’s Communist enemies in the Cold War while denouncing the U.S. as a nation rife with bigotry, injustice, greed, and unrestrained militarism – and calling for America’s unilateral disarmament. During his tenure with SDS, Jones became a sworn enemy of the United States government. Believing that America’s military involvement in Southeast Asia was immoral, he sided openly with the North Vietnamese communists. Formally renouncing the conscientious-objector status that had been conferred on him as a result of his Quaker lineage, he began referring to himself and his ideological comrades as “communist revolutionaries.”…

By mid-June of 1969, Jones, along with Bill Ayers and Mark Rudd, became a leader of SDS’s most militant wing and formed a new radical organization, Weatherman. They issued a Weatherman “manifesto” eschewing nonviolence and calling for armed opposition to U.S. policies; advocating the overthrow of capitalism; exhorting white radicals to trigger a worldwide revolution by fighting in the streets of the “mother country”; and proclaiming that the time had come to launch a race war against the “white” United States on behalf of the non-white Third World…

In March 1970 Jones and his fellow Weathermen adopted a new name, the Weather Underground Organization, taking fake identities and restricting themselves exclusively to covert activities. Also in 1970, Jones and the Weather Underground issued a “Declaration of a State of War” against the United States government. The FBI launched a manhunt to track them down.

Jones would elude law-enforcement authorities for more than a decade. He lived for over a year in San Francisco with fellow fugitive and Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn, who would later marry the America-hating terrorist Bill Ayers. Dohrn and Ayers, you may recall, would eventually (in the mid-1990s) give Barack Obama his start in politics when they hosted meet-and-greet events for him at their home in Chicago…

Since his capture in an October 1981 police sweep, Jones has found a home in the environmental movement, the place where many former communists have established a platform from which to promote anti-capitalist agendas and portray Western industrialized society as the scourge of the natural world…

After all those years as a communist revolutionary seeking to undermine capitalist America, Jeff Jones has finally found his way back home. Now he can pursue that same objective under the more socially acceptable auspices of the Apollo Alliance, the organization whose board of directors features that other Marxist, Van Jones – the man whom President Obama selected six months ago as his highest-level environmental adviser.

So why is anyone surprised that Obama is ruining the economy, diminishing liberty, and sucking up to despotisms of the Third World?

Today it is officially announced that Obama has broken America’s promise to Poland and the Czech Republic to supply them with anti-missile defense shields – as we said he would two weeks ago (Obama abandons Poland and Czech republic to the enemy, September 3). Why is he doing it? The Russians were furiously against the plan, so that’s one poor reason. But the main and outrageous reason is, of course, that Obama is not interested in defending America or its allies or the free(-ish) world.

At ‘the corner’ of the National Review Online, Jay Nordlinger writes:

I thought Barack Obama would be a poor and troublesome president. Did I think he would yuk it up with Hugo Chávez, smirk with Daniel Ortega about the Bay of Pigs, turn his wrath on a Central American country trying to follow its constitution, denounce President Bush abroad, bow to the king of Saudi Arabia, endorse a radical Middle Eastern view of how Israel came into being, knock Western countries that try to protect Muslim girls from unwanted shrouding, invite the Iranian regime to our Fourth of July parties, stay essentially mute in the face of counterrevolution in Iran, squeeze and panic Israel, cold-shoulder the Cuban democrats in order to warm to the Cuban dictatorship, scrap missile defense in Eastern Europe, and refuse to meet with the Dalai Lama [this item doesn’t annoy us as much – JB] — in addition to his attempts to have government eat great portions of American society? No, I did not. You?

Yes, we did. We said so, in generalized prediction. We only don’t understand why the whole country couldn’t see what Obama would set about trying to do: at home, turn America into an impoverished socialist country, and abroad, ally America with its enemies and alienate its friends.

Read the devastatingly revealing bio of Valerie Jarrett – Obama’s closest adviser and the person who got Van Jones into the White House – by Ben Johnson at Front Page Magazine. It concludes:

An international, rootless wanderer abandoned by his father, and occasionally his mother, in search of authenticity, he [Obama] never felt at home until he found his roots, and himself, in the milieu of Hyde Park – a neighborhood big enough to encompass everyone from Marilyn Katz [see below] to Bill Ayers, from Tony Rezko’s vacant adjoining property to Louis Farrakhan’s wandering “security” force. And Valerie Jarrett. Is this what Jarrett reminds the Obamas of: the neighborhood that has been the president’s only true home and shaped or reinforced their values and identity? An elitist sanctuary of pampered radicals, racists, and terrorists, liberated of working class stiffs who bitterly cling to their guns and religion? Increasingly, it seems as though this is what “makes them who they are,” and is becoming the atmosphere Obama, with Jarrett’s help, is recreating in his administration.

Who is Marilyn Katz?

Who is this person to whom Jarrett is so indebted – and whom, we shall see, she calls a personal friend? Marilyn Katz provided “security” for Students for a Democratic Society at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Undercover Chicago policeman William Frapolly told prosecutors that during the Days of Rage, Katz showed protesters a new weapon to use against the police: “a cluster of nails that were sharpened at both ends, and they were fastened in the center.” Police later reported being hit by golf balls with nails through them, as well as excrement. Years later, Katz would insist her “guerrilla nails” were merely “a defensive weapon” to prevent “possible bad behavior by the police.”

Obama is hellbent on shifting America permanently to the political left. The name of  the change he promised is Socialism. He wants ‘health care reform’ not because he wants to reform health care but because  he wants to reform the land of the free into the land of the organized. As Mark Steyn says:

For most of the previous presidency, the Left accused George W. Bush of using 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq. Since January, his successor has used the economic slump as a pretext to “reform” health care. Most voters don’t buy it: They see it as Obama’s “war of choice,” and the more frantically he talks about it as a matter of urgency the weirder it seems. If he’s having difficulty selling it, that’s because it’s not about “health.” … The appeal of this issue to him and to Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank et al is that governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture …

Three stories bubbled up in the past week, although if you read The New York Times and the administration’s other airbrushers you’ll be blissfully unaware of them: The resignation of Van Jones, former (?) communist and current 9/11 “truther,” from his post as Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar.” The reassignment” of Yosi Sergant at the National Endowment for the Arts after he was found to be urging government-funded arts groups to produce “art” in support of Obama policy positions. And, finally, the extraordinary undercover tape from Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government Web site in which officials from ACORN … offer advice on how pimps can get government housing loans for brothels employing underage girls from El Salvador…

What all these individuals share is a supersized view of the state, from a make-work gig coordinating the invention of phony-baloney “green jobs” to Soviet-style government-licensed art in support of heroic government programs to government-funded “community organizers” organizing government funding for jailbait bordellos… Van Jones, Yosi Sergant and ACORN are where Barack Obama’s chosen to live all his adult life…

My sense from Wednesday’s speech is that the president’s gonna shove this through in some form or other. It may cause a little temporary pain in Blue Dog districts in 2010, but the long-term gains will be transformative and irreversible.

A good discussion of Obama’s health-care speech delivered last night to Congress is to be found on Power Line.

It is well worth reading in full. Here are some samples from it:

[Obama said] Instead of honest debate, we have seen scare tactics.

Then, a few minutes later:

Everyone in this room knows what will happen if we do nothing. Our deficit will grow. More families will go bankrupt. More businesses will close. More Americans will lose their coverage when they are sick and need it most. And more will die as a result.

By far the biggest scaremonger on this issue has been Obama himself.

Well the time for bickering is over. The time for games has passed.

I’m not sure whether Obama and his handlers understand how this sort of talk grates on those of us who are not liberal Democrats (a large majority of the country). Debating public policy issues is not “bickering.” Disagreeing with a proposal to radically change one of the largest sectors of our economy is not a “game.” This kind of gratuitous insult–something we never heard from President Bush, for example–is one of the reasons why many consider Obama to be mean-spirited…

Insurance companies will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies – because there’s no reason we shouldn’t be catching diseases like breast cancer and colon cancer before they get worse.

How does that work? Better coverage for more people at less cost. Does anyone actually believe that is possible? I don’t think so.

Obama described his plan for an insurance exchange where those who are not part of a larger plan will be able to buy coverage. He then added:

This exchange will take effect in four years, which will give us time to do it right.

But wait! Aren’t people dying? The Democrats tried to ram their bill through Congress before the August recess, with essentially no debate and with virtually no one having read it. Their theory was that we are facing such a dire emergency that there is not a moment to lose. If, in fact, we have four years to spare, could we maybe stop trying to cram the bill down Americans’ throats?…

Unless everybody does their part, many of the insurance reforms we seek – especially requiring insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions – just can’t be achieved.

This is a key point that many will overlook. One of the central purposes of nearly all health care “reform” proposals is to force young people into the system to help pay older peoples’ bills. Why is it that you can’t force insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions–i.e., “insure” against something that has already happened, a logical impossibility–unless you force young people to “do their part”? Insurance companies, and, eventually, the government as single payer, need young people to pay premiums that far exceed any actual risk to subsidize the known losses that will come from being forced to “insure” people whose medical conditions are not risks but certainties…

Some of people’s concerns have grown out of bogus claims spread by those whose only agenda is to kill reform at any cost. The best example is the claim, made not just by radio and cable talk show hosts, but prominent politicians, that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens. Such a charge would be laughable if it weren’t so cynical and irresponsible. It is a lie, plain and simple.

No, it isn’t. The Democrats’ bill doesn’t call the agencies it sets up “death panels,” it says they will decide on “best practices.” But any socialized medicine scheme saves money by rationing care. Who gets shorted, the politically powerful? No, of course not; the elderly and those who are otherwise helpless…

There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false – the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.

This is an outright lie, as Congressman Joe Wilson couldn’t resist blurting out during Obama’s speech. The Democrats defeated Republican-sponsored amendments that would have attempted, at least, to prevent illegals from being treated under the House version of Obama’s plan. I think everyone expects that if Obamacare becomes law, illegals will receive benefits on an equal basis with citizens.

And one more misunderstanding I want to clear up – under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place.

More oily language from the master of the half-truth. Under Obama’s plan, it won’t be necessary for federal dollars to fund abortions, at least not until socialized medicine actually arrives. Insurance dollars will fund abortions. The House bill sets up a nameless, unaccountable committee that will decide what coverages must be included in any approved private insurance policy. Those required coverages, you can be 100 percent certain, will include the costs of abortions. But Obama will take no responsibility; those are just “best practices.”

This seems to me to be the most critical moment in Obama’s speech:

My guiding principle is, and always has been, that consumers do better when there is choice and competition. Unfortunately, in 34 states, 75% of the insurance market is controlled by five or fewer companies. In Alabama, almost 90% is controlled by just one company. Without competition, the price of insurance goes up and the quality goes down.

In fact, Obama and Congressional Democrats have zero interest in increasing choice and competition. If they did, there is an easy solution. There are over 1,000 health insurance companies in the United States; why do you think it is that in Alabama, one company has 90 percent of the business? It is because there are major legal obstacles to insurance companies operating across state lines. State legislatures, and lots of the companies, like it this way. Competition is hard. But if Obama really wanted to expand “choice and competition” in health care, all he would have to do is go along with the Republican proposal to allow health insurance companies to sell on a national basis… The Democrats’ refusal to allow existing health insurance companies to compete against each other nationwide, more than anything else, puts the lie to their nonsense about “choice and competition.”

President Obama talked about the “public option” and assured listeners that it would not be subsidized by the government:

I have insisted that like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects. But by avoiding some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits, excessive administrative costs and executive salaries, it could provide a good deal for consumers.

Is it churlish to point out that profits are not overhead? It might be if this were just a slip of the tongue on the stump. But this was a speech that was carefully crafted by Obama and his top advisers. They really do not know the first thing about business or economics. So why should we put them in charge of our economy?…

It concludes:

This was not, to put it kindly, a speech that was directed at thinking people.

That could be said of everything Obama utters publicly. Could it be because he is not a thinking person himself?

Ralph Peters writes (read the whole article here):

In June, the elected legislators and the Honduran Supreme Court had enough. As Zelaya aligned with Chavez, the Castro regime, Nicaraguan caudillo Daniel Ortega and other extreme leftists, the Honduran government gave the would-be dictator the boot. Acting under legal orders, the army peacefully arrested Zelaya and shipped him out of the country. No murders, no Chavez-style imprisonments. It was not a military coup. An elected congress and interim president, not a general, run the country today.

But the Obama administration has decided that this “violation” is so dreadful that we won’t even recognize future free elections in Honduras.

Well, President Obama’s taste in elections is finicky:

* He’ll recognize the utterly bogus results of Afghanistan’s corrupt election.

* He initially blessed the results of Iran’s rigged election. (He was for it before he was against it.)

* He hasn’t spoken one word of criticism as Chavez continues to strangle Venezuelan democracy.

* He hasn’t questioned the divisive, racist politics of Presidente Evo Morales in Bolivia.

* He hasn’t demanded free elections in Cuba — instead, he’s easing up on the Castro regime.

But we’re going to show those wicked Hondurans, by George! They can’t boot out a crazy leftwing president just because he’s trying to subvert their Constitution.

Honduras is a small country. But the principle and precedent loom hugely. Have we abandoned democracy entirely? In favor of backing anti-American dictators?

When it is writ so large what Obama’s ideology is (Marxist), and where his sympathies lie (with collectivist regimes, Islam, the Greens), why is anyone surprised by each successive manifestation of his political convictions?  (Though to be fair to clear-sighted Ralph Peters, I don’t think he’s really surprised at all.)

And by the way, what’s happened to Hillary Clinton? Wasn’t she made Secretary of State by Obama? Is she still in that position? Is she still alive? If so, has she been gagged?

Phyllis Schlafly writes in Townhall:

Obama’s nearly trillion-dollar stimulus law designates $128 billion for education, so it’s no surprise that tight strings are attached.Buried in the fine print is an ominous requirement to build a national electronic database of all children. Any state that receives federal education funds must “establish a longitudinal data system that includes the elements described in … the America COMPETES Act.”

That law, passed a couple of years ago, sets out the goal of longitudinal databasing of “student-level enrollment, demographic, and program participation information” for all students from preschool through postsecondary education…

Database collection on each student continues through college and into the workforce. States are required to enter “information regarding the extent to which students transition successfully from secondary school to postsecondary education.”

Creation of a database of this magnitude is the sort of thing that totalitarian governments do but should not be allowed by those who value freedom. It’s scary to think of Obama’s czars and political operatives such as Rahm Emanuel having access to all that personal information on American citizens.