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.

In America now, the Left and the Right could be speaking two different languages, so little do they understand each other.

We on the conservative right are convinced that the mainstream media are heavily biased towards the Left. Confirmation of our view has just been handed to us by the Daily Caller in an article by Jonathan Strong, titled Documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Obama-supporting journalists – a huge majority in the profession – knew all too well that Jeremiah Wright, the pastor whose church Barack Obama had been attending for twenty years, was an America-hating bigot, a fiercely anti-white racist, and a sympathizer with the 9/11 terrorists. Obama’s association with him was so likely to be harmful to his election prospects that they would have suppressed any news of it reaching the voters. But pesky right-wing reporters who did not think that one of Wright’s faithful flock would be a good choice for the presidency of the United States were insistently spreading the information. It made the Obama supporters spitting furious. They sent written advice to each other on how to deal with the threat that the exposure of the truth was posing.

One example from the Daily Caller:

Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

The whole article and all the quotations are worth reading. They prove not just a desire but an active conspiracy to deceive the public and help Obama into the White House.

And yet this is to be found in an article by Eric Alterman in the The Nation, in which he discusses the disappointment progressives are experiencing over Obama’s failure – as they see it – to effect a radical left transformation of America. He tries to explain the failure, and among other snags and hitches (mainly set, he insists, by the Bush administration) he finds that the mainstream media have not sufficiently supported Obama and trumpeted his successes, and that their “reflective prejudices” are against him!

Of course progressives need to keep up the pressure they have begun to place on the mainstream media not to adopt the deliberately misleading and frequently false frames foisted on readers and viewers by an increasingly self-confident and well-funded right-wing noise machine. Media Matters, FAIR and other organizations have done this in the past but it needs to be kept up. And in an age of instant, personal communication, there’s no reason it can’t be. … Done properly, such pressure is an effective means of forcing journalists to rethink some of their reflective prejudices, particularly in today’s punishing economic environment. But if progressives continue to pressure them to live up to the promises of their profession — to refuse to cater to the lowest common denominator of tabloids or the right-wing cesspool of talk radio/cable television discourse — such pressure on these organizations should strengthen reporters’ and editors’ backbones to do the kind of work that made them proud to be journalists in the first place. (This is, happily, a fundamental difference between right and left wing media criticism. The right seeks to undermine the messengers of news that does not comport with its worldview; the left wants journalism to stick to its guns and resist such pressures to color the news, believing, as Stephen Colbert once said, that the facts “have a well-known liberal bias.”) And on the positive side, we need to support those journalistic enterprises and experiments that attempt to live up to their values as it becomes harder and harder to do so, whether with subscriptions, clicks or direct donations. A campaign for taxpayer-funded high-quality journalism on the model of the BBC — and recently suggested by a study published by the Columbia School of Journalism — should not be off the table.

Alterman is apparently perfectly sure that right-wing journalists deliberately distort the news, while ever more obstacles are put in the way of straight factual reporting which would inevitably endorse liberal opinion.

One of the remedies he suggests is “taxpayer-funded journalism”. In other words, government-funded. (As were Pravda [Truth] and Izvestia [News] in the Soviet Union –  about which some Russians dared to joke that there was “no news in Truth, no truth in News”.)

Where can discourse across the political divide even begin? Any attempt at it can only be a dialogue of the deaf.

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.

Republicans are disappointed with Scott Brown, who is turning out to be more of a lefty than they’d hoped and expected.

They should ask themselves: Would the traditionally Democratic electorate of Massachusetts have voted for Scott Brown if he were a true conservative? Not likely.

Fred Dardick writes at Canada Free Press:

In one of the greatest upsets in modern political history, the people of Massachusetts, sick and tired of the free spending, economy destroying ways of Obama and Democrats in Washington, came together to elect Republican Scott Brown to take over [Ted] Kennedy’s old Senate seat with the intention of ushering in a new age of federal fiscal responsibility.

But what a sorry joke that has turned out to be…

The ink wasn’t even dry on the election certificate before the self-described “fiscally conservative” candidate turned his back on the Massachusetts electorate and joined with Democrats to pass Obama’s “jobs” bill. …

Brown’s latest act of conservative betrayal was his clinching vote for the monstrous 2,500 page financial reform bill that contains liberal nonsense like minority and gender hiring quotas for financial firms, union representation on corporate boards, and not one single mention of the actual cause of the economic meltdown, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. …

To think the former beefcake model with seven whole months on the job has the slightest idea what consequences the 500 regulations contained within the bill will have upon our financial system is laughable.

Dardick suspects that Scott Brown is not only stupid but also corrupt:

So the question remains: Why would Brown vote for legislation that he is clearly nowhere near capable of fully understanding? Answer: Money.

It would appear the good Senator’s votes are driven more by desire for personal gain, than genuine concern for the public’s well being. He no doubt understands that fundraising in the liberal bastion of Massachusetts as a Republican would be next to impossible, but if he talks like a Republican and votes like a Democrat, well that’s a whole different ball of wax.

I can picture Obama and other Democrat leaders whispering in Brown’s ear that if he supports the liberal agenda, endless riches and influence will be his. And if not, well… good luck trying to raise money from the Tea Party crowd since your name is now garbage in Republican circles.

Is his name “garbage in Republican circles” – as it ought to be? In conservative circles, yes. But not all Republican circles are conservative – as they ought to be.

We have commented on the danger of permitting Islamic enclaves to develop in America as they have in Europe. See in particular our post The United Islamic States of America?, July 9, 2010.

Until now, immigrant assimilation has been the American way. But there has been a change.

Large numbers of Somalian Muslims are being allowed into the country to be supported on welfare. They are being taught Arabic, but not necessarily English. In all probability they will continue to consider themselves subject to sharia law rather than US state and federal law.

Why is this being allowed to happen?

Have the normal, meticulous vetting procedures for legal immigrants been lifted in the case of Muslims?

If so, who is responsible for such a decision, and why has it been made?

Are there bureaucrats in the State Department actively working to bring about massive Muslim immigration?

Family Security Matters reports:

Newly arrived Somali immigrants have transformed small towns and cities throughout the United States into tuulas (Somali villages).

The process is underway in such places as Lewiston, Maine; Shelbyville, Tennessee; St. Cloud, Minnesota; Clarkston,Georgia; and Jamestown, North Dakota.

The Jamestown Sun reports that 400 Somalis have applied for public housing in the past four months.

The Somali immigrants in Garden City, Kansas and nearby small towns have created the Somali Community Center of Southwest Kansas in order to tap into public welfare programs. …

In East San Diego, the newly arrived Somalis have created a Little Mogadishu. The streets are lined with Somali stores, shops, and mosques. In the midst of this ethnic enclave stands the Iftin Charter School, where K-8 students are introduced to Arabic. 99% of the student population is Somali; Arabs constitute the remaining 1%.

The American Somalis now display the highest unemployment and poverty rates in the country. They also remain the least educated. …

This problem is crystallized by the present situation in Lewiston, Maine, where African Muslims … began arriving in 2001 at the rate of 100 a month. …

The small town in Maine with a population of 30,000 provided welfare to anyone in need, with the state picking up half the tab. Recipients, including the Muslim refugees, were allowed a generous five years of assistance before their benefits became terminated, and extensions for several additional years on the public dole were not difficult to obtain. Single parents could stay on welfare and go to college.

Public housing was also available, although, with the influx of Somalis, the housing projects became packed to capacity. Many of the new project dwellers were single Somali mothers with large broods of children. Those who are unable to obtain public housing were handed Section 8 vouchers, which the federal government provided to subsidize their rent in private apartments. …

The newcomers have shown scant interest in securing employment. When Renee Bernier, the president of the Lewiston city council, offered to hire 30 Somalis at the rate of $8 to $10 an hour to hold warning signs at construction sites, few displayed interest. The handful who did apply, said that they were only willing to work between the hours of 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.

The Somali population of Lewiston now exceeds 40,000.

Those whose hearts have been lifted by the prospect of a Republican Party  victory in November may feel them sinking again if they read the chilling predictions which Charles Krauthammer’s makes in today’s Investor’s Business Daily. If he is right, Republican majorities in Congress could make Obama more dangerous:

I have a warning for Republicans: Don’t underestimate Barack Obama.

Consider what he has already achieved. ObamaCare alone makes his presidency historic. It has irrevocably changed one-sixth of the economy, put the country inexorably on the road to national health care and … begun one of the most massive wealth redistributions in U.S. history.

Second, there is a major financial overhaul, which passed Congress on Thursday. … There is no argument that it will give the government unprecedented power in the financial marketplace.

Its 2,300 pages will create at least 243 new regulations that will affect not only, as many assume, the big banks, but just about everyone, including, as noted in one summary, “storefront check cashiers, city governments, small manufacturers, homebuyers and credit bureaus.”

Third is the near $1 trillion stimulus, the largest spending bill in U.S. history. And that’s not even counting nationalizing the student loan program, regulating CO2 emissions by EPA fiat, and still-fitful attempts to pass cap-and-trade through Congress.

But Obama’s most far-reaching accomplishment is his structural alteration of the U.S. budget. The stimulus, the vast expansion of domestic spending, the creation of ruinous deficits as far as the eye can see are not easily reversed. …

He explains how and why this is true, and  goes on to warn that more woe is to come:

Obama’s transformational agenda is a play in two acts.

Act One is over. The stimulus, ObamaCare, financial overhaul have exhausted his first-term mandate. It will bear no more heavy lifting. And the Democrats will pay the price for ideological overreaching by losing one or both houses, whether de facto or de jure. The rest of the first term will be spent consolidating these gains (writing the regulations, for example) and preparing for Act Two.

Republican control of Congress, Krauthammer warns, could be a positive help to Obama, making it easier for him to be re-elected.

If Democrats lose control of one or both houses, Obama will likely have an easier time in 2012, just as Bill Clinton used Newt Gingrich and the Republicans as his foil for his 1996 re-election campaign.

Obama is down, but it’s very early in the play.

He’s done much in his first 500 days. What he has left to do he knows must await his next 500 days — those that come after re-election.

What will these afflictions be? He forecasts three of them:

The next burst of ideological energy — massive regulation of the energy economy, federalizing higher education and “comprehensive” immigration changes (i.e., amnesty) — will require a second mandate, meaning re-election in 2012.

2012 is the real prize. Obama sees far, farther than even his own partisans.

Republicans, he warns, “underestimate him at their peril”.

But won’t a Republican dominated Congress be stronger next time  …  repeal … stand firm … ?

And does Obama really have much of a chance of re-election? We think not, but that may be because hope springs eternal in the skeptic’s breast.

When former NFL player Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan, Americans were more moved by it than by any other soldier’s death in that war. There was intense interest, particularly in Phoenix, where he had played. But local TV stations dropped coverage of his memorial service as it was going on. Why? Because some of the speakers used bad words. His brother Richard, for example, said, “He’s not with God. He’s f—ing dead.”

Steve Chapman writes about this at Townhall, questioning continued federal censorship of the airwaves media:

It was an honest statement at a public event. But airing it could have cost a TV station a large fine from the Federal Communications Commission — or even its license to broadcast.

The FCC has a policy against vulgar language, even in brief, unscripted outbursts. So broadcasters who know what’s good for them do their best to avoid it, no matter how newsworthy, appropriate or even revealing it may be. …

Americans generally take a wary view of government interference and control in their lives. But for decades, federal regulators, acting at the behest of Congress and the president, have presumed to tell TV and radio stations what they can and cannot broadcast, which also means telling audiences what they may and may not hear.

Never mind that the First Amendment says Congress “shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” Elsewhere, that means what it says. The government may not ban profanity in movies, CDs, e-mails, magazines, newspapers, websites, leaflets, T-shirts or bumper stickers. Only broadcasters are subject to these paternalistic dictates.

The reason offered by the Supreme Court in days of yore is that broadcasting is “uniquely pervasive” in American life. But today, it’s barely more pervasive than other media, like cable TV and the Internet, that are immune from censorship.

For us the meaning of Richard Tillman’s words are more important than his manner of expression. The good soldier Pat Tillman is not “with God” – he’s dead.

But we too are against the censorship of speech. Let it offend, deceive, outrage, as well as inform, delight, inspire …

The “redistribution of wealth” is the confiscation of your earnings by the state to spend on wicked things like state miseducation and state healthcare rationing. It is a tried, tested, reliable way of creating an equality of misery.

As America, the land of liberty, morphs into Obama’s socialist utopia, all taxes must rise, and he’ll not be in the least ashamed of the lies he told to the contrary when he was campaigning for the presidency.

The Heritage Foundation warns about coming tax hikes:

If you earn income, your taxes are about to go up. If Congress does not act to preserve current law, even the lowest 10 percent bracket will rise to 15 percent. Throw in tax hikes on capital gains, dividends and other tax code fixes, and the American economy is staring straight down the barrel of $3.2 trillion tax hike over the next ten years.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that raising taxes by $3.2 trillion dollars would be an economic recovery killer. …

The tax raising culprit here is the expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts set to take effect on January 1, 2011. The leftist majority in Congress is refusing to extend current law because they believe that these tax cuts are the cause of our trillion dollar deficits. They are wrong. …

The real cause of our nation’s debt problem is spending. …

The leftist majority in Congress has had years to address this impending economic disaster but have refused to act. Last month, the House leadership announced that for the first time in the history of the budgeting process, they would not set a budget this year. And not only are they refusing to set any limits on their own spending, but now they are even talking about punting the tax issue into December so that they can raise our taxes without having to answer to the American voter. …

The end of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are just the beginning of President Obama’s tax hike spree. The Obama administration’s budget also calls for higher taxes on small businesses, higher taxes on energy and higher taxes on American companies that compete overseas.

Nile Gardiner, writing in the Telegraph, predicts that Obama’s economic policies will result in catastrophe not only for America, but for the world:

The latest annual Congressional Budget Office Long-Term Budget Outlook … offers a truly frightening picture of the scale of America’s national debt, with huge implications for the country’s future prosperity. …

The CBO warns of potentially devastating consequence for the United States if this debt mountain is not tackled, and even points out that its “projections understate the severity of the long-term budget problem because they do not incorporate the significant negative effects that accumulating substantial amounts of additional federal debt would have on the economy:

“Large budget deficits would reduce national saving, leading to higher interest rates, more borrowing from abroad, and less domestic investment—which in turn would lower income growth in the United States. …”

Over time, higher debt would increase the probability of a fiscal crisis in which investors would lose confidence in the government’s ability to manage its budget, and the government would be forced to pay much more to borrow money.

The CBO assessment is probably the most important economic report the President of the United States will read this year. And it should be a huge wake-up call for the Obama administration, which has so far adopted a policy of sticking its head in the sand in the face of an impending Greek-style financial crisis in the very near future. …

The White House needs to wake up to reality, and aggressively reduce borrowing, cut down on public spending, and dramatically reduce the size of the federal government. If it doesn’t, there will be devastating implications for the United States as the world’s only superpower.

With his reckless big government policies, Barack Obama threatens to run his country into the ground, with American decline the inevitable end result. It is not too late to reverse course, but so far there is not a shred of evidence that the president is willing to do what is necessary. Not only will the United States suffer from this kamikaze-style approach, but the world will too.

J. Christian Adams is the lawyer formerly employed by the Department of Justice who recently revealed the DOJ’s policy of not prosecuting blacks for intimidating white voters (see our post Payback time at the DOJ, June 28, 2010.)

Now at PajamasMedia he reveals another policy decision which makes it plain that under Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, the DOJ disdains the law, and assumes an arbitrary right not to uphold and enforce it.

The “Motor Voter” law was passed in 1993 to promote greater voter registration in the United States. … [It] obliged the states to ensure that no ineligible voters were on the rolls — including dead people, felons, and people who had moved. Our current Department of Justice is anxious to encourage the obligations to get everyone registered, but explicitly unwilling to enforce federal law requiring states to remove the dead or ineligible from the rolls.

In November 2009, the entire Voting Section was invited to a meeting with Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes, a political employee serving at the pleasure of the attorney general. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss Motor Voter enforcement decisions.

The room was packed with dozens of Voting Section employees when she made her announcement regarding the provisions related to voter list integrity:

“We have no interest in enforcing this provision of the law. It has nothing to do with increasing turnout, and we are just not going to do it.”

At Commentary Contentions, John Steele Gordon comments on this:

The only reason I can think of why the DOJ would not want to purge the voter rolls of the names of those ineligible to vote is to make voter fraud as easy to accomplish as possible.

We think he’s right. The decision mocks democracy. But  the issue is bigger and more important even than voter fraud. It is a threat to the rule of law itself.

The law is the house of our safety. Obama with his henchmen and henchwomen are knocking it down. If they are not stopped, we will be left exposed to the whims of dictatorship, whichever way they blow.

The creation of Muslim states-within-a-state in America is the subject of an important article by Ryan Mauro at Front Page Magazine.

Among the examples he provides:

One such community, Gwynn Oak, has been created in Baltimore, Maryland, consisting of Muslim immigrants and African-American converts. The project is led by John Yahya Cason, director of the Islamic Education and Community Development Initiative. Cason explained that the neighborhood is a response to the problem that “Muslim communities are ruled by Western societal tenets, many of which clash with Islamic norms.” In his opinion, there is a need for communities with “the totality of the essential components of Muslim social, economic, and political structure.” As such, the Gwynn Oak enclave follows specific moral rules based on Islam and people there speak Arabic. On September 13, 2009, the construction of its three-story mosque began. Approximately 400 Muslims now live in the vicinity.

Another example involves the Islamic Center for Human Excellence [!], which receives funding from the United Arab Emirates. In August 2004, it was granted permission to build a Muslim neighborhood in Little Rock, Arkansas, complete with a mosque, school, and 22 homes …

As-Sabiqun [is] headed by Imam Abdul Alim Musa, who is very honest about his disturbing objectives. The group’s website calls for installing Islamic law worldwide, fighting for “oppressed” Muslims, and “build[ing] model communities where Islam is lived.” The website contains a point-by-point plan to assemble mini-states in America, beginning with the construction of a mosque and finishing with “establishing geographical integrity by encouraging Muslims of the community to live in close proximity to the masjid [mosque]” and “establishing social welfare institutions.” … The website boasts about Musa’s early endorsement of Ayatollah Khomeini and the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. It also is unafraid to say that As-Sabiqun members follow people like Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood; Maulana Mawdudi, who called on Muslims to wage jihad until Sharia law is in place over the globe; and Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood member whose preaching inspired Osama bin Laden. …

Muslims of the Americas, led by Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani in Pakistan, is a very similar group with very similar aims, though its focus is more rural than urban. It admits to owning at least 22 “villages” around the country [the US] that are dozens of acres large and operate under names like “Islamberg,” “Holy Islamville,” and “Aliville.” …This group has received considerable media attention due to allegations that its isolated compounds are used for paramilitary training … On that tape, a speaker is seen declaring the U.S. a Muslim country …

Another collective aspiring to create autonomous Muslim regions in the U.S. is called the Ummah. … The FBI describes the Ummah as a “nationwide radical fundamentalist Sunni group consisting mainly of African-Americans” and says that its goal is to create “a separate, sovereign Islamic state (‘the Ummah’) within the borders of the United States, governed by Sharia law. …

The author points out that while “the possibility that Muslim-only towns and urban enclaves could be created inside the U.S. seems like a fantasy to most Americans at the moment … there is precedent in Europe. The French government actually has a website where it tabulates 751 ‘sensitive urban zones,’ which have been accurately described as ‘no-go zones’. In these areas, which are mostly populated by Muslim immigrants, there is a high level of crime and hostility to any governing authority, including law enforcement. Police officers do not regularly patrol the areas and they are as close to being autonomous regions as possible without the erecting of an actual parallel government.

He concludes with a warning:

If successful, these territories will be the first to establish Sharia law in the country, thus offering a profound challenge to America’s constitutional order.