Among the corrupt hypocritical bleeding-heart lefties who like to live high and party up there at the tax-payer’s expense, is Drinker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

From Judicial Watch:

Last year, Judicial Watch made big news by exposing Nancy Pelosi’s boorish demands for military travel. According to the internal DOD correspondence we uncovered the Speaker has been treating the U.S. Air Force as her own personal airline. And not only was her staff demanding, arrogant and rude, but the Speaker cost taxpayers a lot of money by making last minute cancellations and changes to the itinerary.

This week, Judicial Watch obtained documents from the Air Force that shed a bit more light on this ugly story.

According to the documents, which we obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Speaker’s military travel cost the Air Force $2,100,744.59 over a two-year period — $101,429.14 for in-flight expenses, including food and alcohol. (Lots and lots of alcohol.) The following are highlights from the recent release of about 2,000 documents …

Speaker Pelosi used Air Force aircraft to travel back to her district at an average cost of $28,210.51 per flight. The average cost of an international congressional delegation (CODEL) is $228,563.33. Of the 103 Pelosi-led CODELs, 31 trips included members of the House Speaker’s family.

One CODEL traveling from Washington, D.C. through Tel Aviv, Israel to Baghdad, Iraq from May 15-20, 2008, “to discuss matters of mutual concern with government leaders” included members of Congress and their spouses and cost $17,931 per hour in aircraft alone. Purchases for the CODEL included: Johnny Walker Red scotch, Grey Goose vodka, E&J brandy, Bailey’s Irish Crème, Maker’s Mark whiskey, Courvoisier cognac, Bacardi Light rum, Jim Beam whiskey, Beefeater gin, Dewars scotch, Bombay Sapphire gin, Jack Daniels whiskey, Corona beer and several bottles of wine.

According to a “Memo for Record” from a CODEL March 29 – April 7, 2007, that involved a stop in Israel, “CODEL could only bring Kosher items into the Hotel. Kosher alcohol for mixing beverages in the Delegation room was purchased on the local economy i.e. Bourbon, Whiskey, Scotch, Vodka, Gin, Triple Sec, Tequila, etc.”

The Department of Defense advanced a CODEL of 56 members of Congress and staff $60,000 to travel to Louisiana and Mississippi July 19-22, 2008, to “view flood relief advances from Hurricane Katrina.” The three-day trip cost the U.S. Air Force $65,505.46, exceeding authorized funding by $5,505.46. ..

At the heart of the issue of corruption, is a sense of entitlement on the part of our elected officials. Nancy Pelosi clearly believes she deserves special treatment at taxpayer expense. This message comes across loud and clear in the disrespect she has demonstrated towards the U.S. Air Force and the American taxpayer.

The food police, led by First Busybody Michelle Obama, are on the warpath.

Why can’t these obominable people mind their own business? Medium-sized people as we are, we libertarians of this website stand in solidarity (as the left would say) with our large-sized fellow citizens against these interfering bossieboots.

Reuters reports:

U.S. health officials have leveraged the star power of first lady Michelle Obama to roll out a new campaign against obesity, a preventable condition that drains billions of dollars from the economy.

Could someone explain to us how on earth obesity, or for that matter any other condition of the human body, can ‘drain billions of dollars from the economy’?

If there was a nationalized health service in America the government would be sure to claim the right to interfere with what and how much people eat – Fat Panels alongside the Death Panels – but as there is no such thing at least for the present, neither the government nor its henchwomen have any excuse to monitor and complain about individual choices even if they affect those individuals’ health.

[Michelle] Obama, who plans to take on childhood obesity as a cause, headlined the launch on Thursday of Surgeon General Regina Benjamin’s blueprint for what can be done at home, school and work to reverse the epidemic.

Hasn’t the First Busybody got anything better to do? Actually no, probably not.

In her first initiative since becoming “America’s doctor,” Benjamin issued a report on the consequences of obesity to start a national dialogue on the subject.

“The number of Americans, like me, who are struggling with their weight and health conditions related to their weight remains much too high,” she said.

Benjamin’s report lists recommendations for preventing obesity. They range from simply eating more fruit and vegetables to adding “high-quality physical education” in schools and bringing more supermarkets to low-income communities.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said at the launch that the Obama administration was investing $650 million in economic stimulus money in wellness and prevention programs aimed at obesity and stopping smoking.

Ah, now we see! So the government is going to waste hundreds of millions of tax-payer’s money on this busybodying in order to claim the right to interfere? Waste the money and then accuse those they’re interfering with of being the wasters?

She introduced the first lady as “everyone’s favorite vegetable gardener.”

Charmingly sycophantic. But – everyone’s? Not ours! And wasn’t there something about the soil in the White House garden being too full of chemicals to grow edible vegetables? If so, it’s gone down the official memory hole.

[Michelle] Obama, who created a White House garden with local school children, said the solution to the obesity epidemic cannot come from government alone. Everyone has to be willing to do their part to end the public health crisis.

Here it is – the community organizing. The mind of the collectivist at work. ‘Don’t make me alone bear this burden of ordering the lives of 300 million people – be kind enough to share it with me by co-operating.’  That, in coy terms,  is what happened in China when Mao launched the Cultural Revolution.

“This will not be easy and it won’t happen overnight. And it won’t happen simply because the first lady has made it her priority,” Obama told an audience of children’s advocates [?] at a recreation center in Alexandria, outside Washington.

“It’s going to take all of us. Thank God it’s not going to be solely up to me.”

The United States spends nearly $150 billion a year on obesity and related complications — twice what it cost in 1998 and more than every cancer cost put together, Sebelius said.

Note  – in their minds it is the ‘United States’ that spends this money.

Perhaps the First Busybody, obviously having too much time on her hands, could use some of it to learn some basic Economics.

“The unhealthier we are as a nation, the more our health care costs will continue to rise and the less competitive we will be globally,” she said.

Good grief! What a silly woman!

President Obama has no respect for the truth.

John Ellis has posted a long list of his lies at Front Page.

And Erick Erickson provides a list of lobbyists who are serving in his administration even as Obama continues to claim falsely that he’s ‘excluded lobbyists from policy-making jobs or seats on federal boards and commissions’.

Obama  is not merely an occasional liar as politicians tend to be. He apparently lies as a matter of habit, and with such conviction that he probably believes his own whoppers as he tells them. This characteristic dishonesty is one of the many facts about him that make him unfit for the office he holds.

Now Hans von Spakovsky, who has served on the Federal Election Commission, writes at The Foundry of the Heritage Foundation:

The two claims President Obama made [in his State of the Union speech] about  the Court’s decision … in the Citizens United case are categorically and undeniably false.

President Obama claimed that the Supreme Court had “reversed a century of law to open the floodgates – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections.” Justice Alito seemed to shake his head and mouth the words “not true.” And well he should. …

First of all, the 100-year claim is completely wrong. In 1907, Congress passed the Tillman Act that banned direct contributions by corporations to federal candidates – there was no ban on independent political expenditures in the law. “Contributions” are funds given directly to candidates for their election campaigns; independent expenditures are funds spent by third parties on things like political advertisements without any coordination with the candidate.

The Tillman Act was sponsored by South Carolina Senator Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman, probably the most vicious racist to ever serve in Congress. Tillman was a Democratic segregationist who was chiefly responsible for the imposition of Jim Crow in South Carolina after the end of Reconstruction when he was governor. This federal law, that so-called “progressives” like the President are constantly praising, was intended by Tillman to hurt the Republican Party – the party of abolition and Abraham Lincoln – because many corporations contributed to the Republican Party, not the Democratic Party. These corporations did not like segregation in the South – it cost them money and made it more expensive to sell their goods and services.

Congress did not ban independent political expenditures by corporations and labor unions until 1947. For three decades after the passage of that law, the Supreme Court went out of its way to avoid upholding its constitutionality, and the Court actually struck down a separate ban on independent expenditures … It was not until 1990 in the Austin case that the Court, in a 5-4 decision, upheld a state ban on independent political expenditures by a nonprofit corporation (a trade association) in a case completely at odds with prior precedent. The actual electioneering communications provision at issue in the Citizens United case was part of the McCain-Feingold amendments to federal campaign finance law in 2002. …

While the Supreme Court in Citizens United found that the corporate ban on independent political expenditures is unconstitutional, it did not touch the ban on direct contributions to federal candidates. That is the ban that represents “a century of law” and it remains in force today contrary to the President’s assertion.

The President’s second point about those evil foreign corporations is also totally wrong. … It is simply not true that Citizens United freed foreign corporations to make independent expenditures in American elections… Under current law, there are multiple layers of protection to prevent foreign influence on our elections. …

Foreign corporations are prohibited from participating in American elections. But their domestic subsidiaries that are American companies, employ American workers, have American officers, and pay American taxes, are able to participate in the American election process to the same extent as other U.S. companies as long as all of the money and all of the decisions are American. …

The Citizens United decision did not even consider this ban on foreign nationals.

So the President was completely out-of-line when he made the claim that foreign corporations would be able to spend without limit in our elections, a claim that seems to have become a talking point for critics of the Supreme Court’s decision.

The President should know better than to make these false claims. After all, he taught a voting rights class at the University of Chicago that loosely covered campaign finance law, and his new White House counsel is Bob Bauer, probably the leading Democratic campaign finance lawyer in Washington. Bauer even wrote one of the only books that exists explaining the nuts and bolts of federal campaign finance law.

The President owes Justice Alito and the other justices of the Supreme Court an apology for completely mischaracterizing their opinion, an opinion that helped restore the full protections of the First Amendment. It was a decision that upheld some of our most basic principles, principles about the freedom to engage in political speech that are incorporated into the Constitution, a document that the critics of this decision seem all to willing to ignore when its requirements don’t fit their political objectives.

The law is the house of our safety. We live in it with confidence. But is it being surreptitiously undermined?

Aspects of Islamic law are  being enforced in Britain and other European countries as a parallel system with the law of the land, although its is fundamentally incompatible with the ethical principles on which both British and European systems of law have been developed. This is happening at the same time as the undemocratic EU is imposing its ever more tyrannical will over the continent.

Serious and persistent attempts are being made by Muslim groups to establish sharia law similarly in America.

And it seems sharia is not the only ‘other’ system of law that may gain a foothold in the US.

This article by Barry Napier warns that an attempt is being made to remove the protection of federal and state law from individuals who enter American-Indian tribal territory. We don’t know if he’s right about the intentions behind these moves, but we think what he has to say is worth hearing.

Idaho pro-Obama bosses are trying to muscle-through ‘Custer Legislation’ … The idea is to give Indians total legal control over any non-Indian who even passes through their territory. They would be tried under separate tribal laws, and even if the accused comes from outside the reservation, they cannot call in outside help or legal counsel! And only Indians would be allowed to sit on the jury. …

The bright-sparks who are trying to bring this in are Idaho Attorney General Wasden and US Attorney Thomas Moss. They have been working out the details for the past six months… and everyone in the USA should ask “Why?” What is the point of making parts of the USA free from state and national laws?

The EU, that monolith no-one voted for and which has now taken control over every aspect of life in all member states without the authority of the people, has drawn up a new map of Europe. Literally. In it, the country of England simply does not exist. [This is true – JB.] Other smaller countries have also disappeared. It is a future map of what the EU wants Europe to be like in the very near future. At the same time, the EU encourages each member country to devolve power to smaller regional Assemblies, each making its own laws… but at least each law must be consistent with whatever the EU demands.

At first each country picked and chose which laws to implement even though they opposed national laws (just like the Idaho situation). Then, they were all harmonized, again without consent of the people. …

Why do it? That’s simple. By devolving power to smaller regional units, the EU can get rid of ‘countries’ and get on with creating a massive European state consisting only of regions, each answerable to their own ‘countries’, but each country, if it still exists, will be a rubber-stamper of whatever the EU wants. In other words, smaller units without country affiliations are controlled directly by the EU, and are much easier to bring into line than whole countries. It also means that when the EU is fully operational, regions have no power. …

Why should a state create a law-region within itself, unlinked to the greater laws? Is this the start of an EU-style take-over of power? At one end we have Obama’s promise to hand over the USA to the UN, and the UN’s decision to work in harmony with Interpol, who has immunity (for no good reason) from US laws. At the other end, we have this seemingly small ‘concession’ to create laws within laws.

Now join the dots! In between will come more states offering more similar powers to their own reservations and then even to conglomerates and others. There will then be pockets of laws-within-laws within states, each incompatible and fracturing the legal system wide open. What is the result of this? Confusion and uproar! …

Look closely at the idea of creating pockets of law within states, that are not controlled by that state. It is chaotic. And that’s what Marxists love, because making chaos is necessary for them to impose their draconian requirements on the people. Can you now see the dots joining? It is a breaking-up of power, just as in Europe. Without this notion of breaking-up state power, there is no reason at all to bring in such a foolish piece of devolution!

The Idaho Sheriff’s Association does not want this kind of devolution. But, how many laws has Obama ridden rough-shod over to get his own way? How many laws does he ignore in his mindless rush to make the USA Red?

County Sheriff Doug Giddings said he invited a lobbyist to speak to him about the idea. Then, he presented it to the Sheriff’s Association in December. They “voted unanimously to NOT back the legislation”. And, as Giddings adds, “We’ve discussed it every way but Sunday, and it doesn’t do any of us any good. The Feds and the tribe are the only ones to gain power and authority over non-tribal on the reservation…. I vote ‘No’.”

Exactly – there is no sense in it, because it makes things worse, not better! The only sense is that it is part of a far greater plan from outside. I have already outlined what that plan is. I believe my response is an ‘educated guess’, because it is based on knowledge of how Marxists work out their strategies, and by knowing the history of communism and Obama. …

Benewah County Prosecuting Attorney, Douglas Paul Payne …  implies a deeper agenda in his own email to fellow Attorneys: “This issue may seem unimportant to counties that are not concurrent with a reservation, but it involves issues beyond county/tribal relations.” …

The tribe wants the legislation (of course they do!) but the Sheriffs oppose it, for real practical and ethical reasons.

The proposed bill is the State and Indian Tribal Cooperative Law Enforcement Act. One tribe has framed and pushed this proposed law, but another two have not. That a smaller unit within a state can be free of state laws is amazing, because there is no accountability … If passed, the law would “violate Art IV sec. 20 of the Idaho Constitution…”

There are numerous other violations. So, to create a separate legal entity within the state, one has to violate any laws pertaining to it. The idea also violates the national Constitution…

It would mean that any non-tribal person should be warned never to enter the tribal lands for any reason, because they could be liable to arbitrary arrest and sentencing by those not appointed by the state!

Payne goes on to say: “It is important to all Idahoans not to establish a precedent of delegating state law enforcement power to anyone not answerable to the people subjected to that power.”

He says “Counties have been enforcing state law on reservations for 120 years and there appears no immediate emergency. Curiously, this bill is being rushed to the floor.” Just like many other Obama moves! There is no reason to implement the bill… so there has to be an external prompt with an hidden national agenda. …

If the bill passes through it will create another precedent, one so huge as to threaten national security and society. …

The Central Idaho Post is bravely opposing the proposed bill and is asking for all state citizens to write in opposition to the AG of the state. I believe the issue is far bigger, as Attorney Payne tells us, and should involve everyone in the USA. …

Although the president said in his State of the Union speech last night that ‘The true engine of job creation in this country will always be America’s businesses’, which seems to be a pro-free market view, Erick Erickson at REDSTATE finds convincing evidence in the speech that Obama is against the free market, and probably does not understand how it works.

He quotes this passage:

To make college more affordable, this bill will finally end the unwarranted taxpayer-subsidies that go to banks for student loans. Instead, let’s take that money and give families a $10,000 tax credit for four years of college and increase Pell Grants. And let’s tell another one million students that when they graduate, they will be required to pay only ten percent of their income on student loans, and all of their debt will be forgiven after twenty years – and forgiven after ten years if they choose a career in public service. Because in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they chose to go to college. And it’s time for colleges and universities to get serious about cutting their own costs – because they too have a responsibility to help solve this problem.

And he comments: 

Barack Obama wants to create a new entitlement that will drive the costs of collegiate education through the roof. If a student knows that only ten percent of their income will be used to pay their student loans and no matter what those students loans are they will be forgiven after 20 years, neither the student nor the college has any incentive to save money. It is basic free market economics.

That the President of the United States would say such a thing and think it a good, responsible idea suggests the man is truly ignorant of or an enemy of the free market.

Beyond that, note the preference for government work. Job creators are given a disincentive. Job regulators are given an incentive. This is both perverse and noxious.

One cannot read through the State of the Union address and come to any other conclusion than that Barack Obama is declaring war on the free market. It is more and more clear that Barack Obama does not have an American world view.

A transcript of the whole SOTU speech can be found here.

We think this glossary of favorite Obama expressions and how they should be interpreted is both accurate and good fun. It’s from an article by Ben Shapiro writing  at Townhall:

In order to understand what Obama truly tells us when he speaks to us, it is necessary to grab our Little Orphan Annie Decoder Ring and decipher precisely what he means when he uses his pet phrases. This, then, is a list of his favorite linguistic flourishes — and just what he means when he uses them:

“Hope and change”: Socialism at home, surrender abroad. Obama uses this talismanic formula when he wants to activate his base, which responds to it like a jukebox when you drop in a nickel.

“False choice”: A very real choice Obama wants to pretend doesn’t exist. He uses this when he puts on his “pragmatic administrator” mask. Instead of facing up to the reality that we sometimes have to choose between scientific advances and morality, or between civil liberties and national security, or between environmental regulations and economic development, Obama pretends he can solve these conflicts through some sort of Hegelian synthesis only he is wise enough to comprehend.

“Deficit reduction”: Deficit increases. Obama suggests that he will cut the rate at which the deficit is growing — something he has never actually achieved — and acts as though this is actual deficit reduction. It’s the equivalent of a woman spending $2,000 on her credit card, then informing her credit card company that though she won’t pay off her debt, she’ll only spend $1,500 next month.

“Let me be clear”: Let me lie to you.

“Make no mistake”: See “let me be clear.”

“Unprecedented”: When he’s doing something beneficial for the American people, Obama claims he is the first to ever think of it; when he’s doing something harmful, he seems to always find a precedent for it in FDR or LBJ.

“This isn’t about me”: This is completely about me.

“Hitting the reset button”: Refusing to learn from the mistakes of the past and acting as though a fresh start requires utter naivete.

“Reaching out to the other side of the aisle”: Totally rejecting all ideas from anyone outside the Obama-approved bubble. Then suggesting that subsequent political impasses are their fault, and that they ought to bend down and grab their ankles to establish a new tone in Washington.

“Failed policies of the past”: Don’t blame me! Blame Bush!

“Teachable moment”: I screwed something up, now I’ll brag about it.

“Tax cut”: Redistribution of money from those who pay a disproportionate amount of taxes to those who pay none.

“Transparency”: Deliberate opaqueness, hiding crucial facts from the American public.

“Accountability”: Don’t worry, I’ll fire someone.

“Stimulus”: Payoffs to friends.

“Shovel-ready jobs”: Jobs that no one wants and that last for two months.

“Green jobs”: Imaginary jobs.

“Saved or created”: Old Obama language used to futz the numbers on jobs.

“Recovery”: Continued economic stagnation.

“Jobs funded”: Jobs Obama will take credit for, even though he has done nothing to either save or create.

“It won’t happen overnight”: It will never happen.

“Progress”: Redistribution.

“Cynics”: Anyone who doesn’t believe in the Obama radical agenda. Obama uses this word to disparage his critics as angry and lacking in basic qualities of human kindness.

There’s an old quip about the British Foreign Office, that just as the Ministry of Defence is for defence [British spelling], the Foreign Office is for foreigners. Another in similar vein: They found a mole in the Foreign Office – he was working for Britain. And who can forget if he’s once seen it the episode of ‘Yes, Prime Minister’ in which an especially slithery FO official, informed by the PM that he’s being posted to Israel, protests, ‘But you know I’m on the Arab side!’ and the PM retorts, ‘I thought you were on our side.’

Career diplomats, at least in the First World, tend to lose sight of what their job is really all about – to look after the interests of their country in dealings with other countries – and instead come to believe that their high, almost priestly, calling is to maintain amicable relations with their foreign counterparts; so as soon as a conflict of interest arises, they are ready to negotiate the terms of their surrender. In Britain this standard maneuver is called the pre-emptive cringe.

A perfect illustration is the US State Department’s transactions with the Taliban. The history is related in some detail by Michael Rubin in Commentary (Taking Tea with the Taliban, February 2010). ‘The story the documents tell,’ he writes, ‘is one of engagement for its own sake – without any consideration given to the behavior or sincerity of an unambiguously hostile interlocutor.’

The exercise in futility, a dialogue of the credulous and the cunning, began in February 1995 when US diplomats met seven Taliban spokesmen in Kandahar. The diplomats wanted information. They got none. Therefore they reported that ‘the Taliban appeared well-disposed toward the United States’.

‘Later the same week, another US diplomat met a Taliban “insider” who told the official what he wanted to hear: the Taliban liked the United States, had no objection to elections in Afghanistan, and were suspicious of both Saudi and Pakistani intentions. This was nonsense, but it was manna for American diplomats who wanted to believe that engagement was possible.’

America wanted the Taliban to stop sheltering Osama bin Laden. When the Taliban took Kabul and became the de facto government of Afghanistan, the US ambassador to Pakistan, Thomas W. Simons, met with Mullah Ghaus, who bore the title of Foreign Minister, to ‘discuss the fact’ that they were giving safe haven to terrorists. Ghaus said there weren’t any terrorists, but if the US would give the Taliban money, they might possibly be ‘more helpful’ to the US. What could he have meant – that they’d find some terrorists lurking about after all? Clarification was not requested, however, and by this hopeful suggestion Simons apparently felt much encouraged.

Even without getting American aid, the Taliban had scored a success. They had violently seized power, but were being negotiated with by the US State Department as a legitimate government. It was enough and more than enough to gratify them, and they had achieved it without making a single concession: they still sheltered bin Laden, and could carry on savagely torturing prisoners and making the lives of Afghan women unrelenting hell without it costing them anything at all.

The US was grateful to the Taliban just for being willing to talk, and the Taliban were grateful to the US for being willing just to talk – because they knew that as long as the talk went on, the Americans would do nothing else. It was a match made in diplomat’s heaven. But what the State Department or President Clinton thought they now had to bargain with, only heaven could tell.

In 1997 Madeleine Albright became Secretary of State and was eager to continue the engagement. ‘Diplomats met Taliban representatives every few weeks … What resulted was theater: the Taliban would stonewall on terrorism but would also dangle just enough hope to keep diplomats calling.’

The very refusal on the part of the Taliban to expel bin Laden seemed to the Clinton administration a compelling reason to go on talking. Not to talk to them would ‘isolate’ them, and that, the National Security Council reckoned, would be a dangerous consequence. Instead they were to be shown yet more goodwill by the US: they were given the money they’d asked for. Of course the funds were carefully labeled: this for providing schools for girls; this for sowing new crops in the fields that had hitherto grown only poppies for the heroin trade. The Taliban took the money, spent it on arms or whatever they liked, continued to deny education to girls, left the poppies in the fields, and pocketed the lesson that the more obstinate they were the more they’d get from the United States.

The US had no compunction about leaving the Northern Alliance isolated, ‘the group of one-time rebels and chieftains that constituted the only serious resistance to the Taliban’. In April 1998 the American ambassador to the UN, Bill Richardson, went to Afghanistan and deceived himself into believing that he brokered a cease-fire between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, while in fact the fighting between them intensified and continued until the US invasion three years later.

For yet more talks, the Clinton administration then welcomed Taliban delegates into America. The issues were again the treatment of women and terrorists using Afghanistan as a base. An ‘acting minister of Islam and culture’ explained that it was Islamic custom to treat women the way the Taliban did, implying that in the name of the American idea of multicultural tolerance Americans could raise no objection to it. As for bin Laden, they promised to keep him isolated and subdued.

So subdued was he kept that shortly afterwards, in August 1998, his al-Qaeda terrorists carried out their plots to attack the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing hundreds and injuring thousands. Clinton retaliated by having a factory flattened in the Sudan, destroying a terrorist training camp with a cruise missile in Afghanistan – and continuing diplomatic engagement with the Taliban.

The Taliban were furious about the training-camp. Mullah Omar, ‘spiritual head’ of the Taliban, phoned the State Department and complained angrily about it. The plots had not been hatched in Afghanistan he insisted, and it was grossly unfair of the US to avenge itself on his country. But he was open to dialogue, he conceded – to the relief of Madeleine Albright. The Taliban’s ‘foreign minister’ Maulawi Wakil Ahmed, met the US ambassador to Pakistan, William B. Milam, and reiterated that they would not expel bin Laden, whose presence in Afghanistan he referred to as a ‘problem’, by which he might have meant for the Americans than rather than the Taliban, but the word made Milam feel hopeful. The ‘diplomatic pressure’, he concluded, was working, and must be kept up. So the talks continued.

When a court in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan found bin Laden not guilty of being involved in the East African attacks, a suspicion rose in the mind of Alan Eastham, a diplomat in the Islamabad legation. “It is possible that the Taliban are simply playing for time,” he wrote; but nevertheless he thought “it is at least [also] possible that they – some of them – are serious about finding a peaceful way out.” [My italics]

Unable or unwilling to see that the Taliban and al-Qaeda were two claws of the same beast, and disregarding all proofs that the Taliban were acting in bad faith, the Clinton State Department insistently proceeded with its pointless, fruitless, self-defeating dialogue. The Taliban and al-Qaeda ‘exploited American naiveté and sincerity at the ultimate cost of several thousand [American] lives.’ For while the talks were proceeding, bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were putting their heads together in Tora Bora to plot 9/11.

When George W. Bush became president, the talks were broken off. And when, after 9/11, America struck at Taliban-ruled, al-Qaeda-harboring Afghanistan, it won a swift military victory – but then lingered on to try and transform the primitive tribal nation with a long history of unremitting internecine strife into a peaceful democracy.

The Taliban fought back, and are winning. And President Obama is returning to the policy of engagement. His administration has revived the fiction that there is a good Taliban and a bad Taliban, and in their desperation to end the war without seeming to be beaten, they are trying to include the Taliban in the farcical ‘democratic’ government that has been established under American auspices. It’s a weird concept: you win a war if you empower your enemy, pretending that he has been born again as your friend.

Now General McChrystal will try to persuade America’s allies at a London conference that the surge he is planning with 30,000 extra troops will lead to a negotiated settlement. But the Financial Times of January 25, 2010, reports that the general acknowledges his ‘growing skepticism about [winning?] the war’.

This seems to be the best he is hoping for: ‘By using the reinforcements to create an arc of secure territory stretching from the Taliban’s southern heartlands to Kabul, Gen McChrystal aims to weaken the insurgency to the point where its leaders would accept some form of settlement with Afghanistan’s government. … But the general warned that violence would rise as insurgents stepped up bombings to try to undermine his strategy.’

The allies he needs to persuade at the conference ‘suffered a 70% rise in casualties last year ‘ and they doubt the credibility of the Afghan government. No wonder there is not much vigorous, confident hope to be detected in the general’s expectations of his allies’ response or in his own strategy if the FT report is to be trusted. It conveys deeply dispiriting indications of McChrystal’s state of mind. The one thing it claims that he and the Taliban agree on is that ‘110,000 foreign troops should go home’. The Afghan government, it says, has ‘little incentive to alter the status quo while atop a lucrative war economy’. And ‘with Barack Obama planning to start withdrawing US troops in mid-2011, the Taliban may believe it has far more resolve than the west’ – meaning, presumably, that it has only to wait and the whole country will be back in its bloodstained hands again.

McChrystal bears the responsibility of saving Obama’s face, which unfortunately is also America’s face. For this desperate if not entirely ignoble purpose the lives of brave soldiers in the magnificent fighting forces of the United States are now being hazarded.

Meanwhile bin Laden apparently lives and al-Qaeda grows, and they continue to plot death and destruction. It seems that diplomacy is not after all the most effective means of stopping them.

Jillian Becker January 26, 2010

Just what sort of socialism for the 21st. century is the Obama administration in favour of? Is it good news, moderately good news, moderately bad news, or bad news to Obama that Chavez’s sort seems to have lost its appeal to Venezuela, and perhaps to most of Latin America?

From the Washington Post:

While the world has been preoccupied with the crisis in Haiti, Latin America has quietly passed through a tipping point in the ideological conflict that has polarized the region — and paralyzed U.S. diplomacy [why? – JB]  — for most of the past decade.

The result boils down to this: Hugo Chávez’s “socialism for the 21st century” has been defeated and is on its way to collapse.

During the past two weeks, just before and after the earthquake outside Port-au-Prince, the following happened: Chávez was forced to devalue the Venezuelan currency, and impose and then revoke massive power cuts in the Venezuelan capital as the country reeled from recession, double-digit inflation and the possible collapse of the national power grid. In Honduras, a seven-month crisis triggered by the attempt of a Chávez client to rupture the constitutional order quietly ended with a deal that will send him into exile even as a democratically elected moderate is sworn in as president.

Last but not least, a presidential election in Chile, the region’s most successful economy, produced the first victory by a right-wing candidate since dictator Augusto Pinochet was forced from office two decades ago. Sebastián Piñera, the industrialist and champion of free markets who won, has already done something that no leader from Chile or most other Latin American nations has been willing to do in recent years: stand up to Chávez.

Venezuela is “not a democracy,” Piñera said during his campaign. He also said, “Two great models have been shaped in Latin America: One of them led by people like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Castro in Cuba and Ortega in Nicaragua. . . . I definitely think the second model is best for Chile. And that’s the model we are going to follow: democracy, rule of law, freedom of expression, alternation of power without caudillismo.”

Piñera was only stating the obvious — but it was more than his Socialist predecessor, Michelle Bachelet, or Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been willing to say openly. That silence hamstrung the Bush and the Obama administrations, which felt, rightly or wrongly, that they should not be alone in pointing out Chávez’s assault on democracy. Piñera has now provided Washington an opportunity to raise its voice about Venezuelan human rights violations [but will it? Obama seemed all too friendly with Chavez – JB.]

He has done it at a moment when Chávez is already reeling from diplomatic blows. Honduras is one. Though the country is tiny, the power struggle between its established political elite and Chávez acolyte Manuel Zelaya turned into a regional battle between supporters and opponents of the Chávez left — with Brazil and other leftist democracies straddling the middle.

The outcome is a victory for the United States, which was virtually the only country that backed the democratic election that broke the impasse.

Eventually, yes, but the US Department of State under Hillary Clinton insisted for a prolonged period on the reinstatement of Zelaya. It seems to us that the omission of this fact typifies the pro-Democrat bias of the Washington Post. The technique of the left media is to ignore facts that challenge their prejudices.

Honduras is the end of Chávez’s crusade to export his revolution to other countries. Bolivia and Nicaragua will remain his only sure allies. Brazil’s Lula, whose tolerance of Chávez has tarnished his bid to become a global statesman, will leave office at the end of this year; polls show his party’s nominee trailing a more conservative candidate. …

Then there is the meltdown Chávez faces at home. Despite the recovery in oil prices, the Venezuelan economy is deep in recession and continues to sink even as the rest of Latin America recovers. Economists guess inflation could rise to 60 percent in the coming months. Meanwhile, due to a drought, the country is threatened with the shutdown of a hydroelectric plant that supplies 70 percent of its electricity. And Chávez’s failure to invest in new plants means there is no backup. There is also the crime epidemic — homicides have tripled since Chávez took office, making Caracas one of the world’s most dangerous cities….

Chávez … is ranting about the U.S. “occupation” of Haiti; his state television even claimed that the U.S. Navy caused the earthquake using a new secret weapon. On Sunday his government ordered cable networks to drop an opposition-minded television channel.

But Chavez’s approval ratings are still sinking: They’ve dropped to below 50 percent in Venezuela and to 34 percent in the rest of the region. The caudillo has survived a lot of bad news before and may well survive this. But the turning point in the battle between authoritarian populism and liberal democracy in Latin America has passed — and Chávez has lost.

Socialism grows government and shrinks the market, including the job market.

From Analects of a Skeptic:

The fatter the government, the thinner the people

The more generous the government, the more robbed the people

The more secure the government, the more threatened the people

… which provides an apt comment on this news.

From The Heritage Foundation:

Since President Barack Obama was sworn into office, the U.S. economy has shed 3.4 million jobs and the unemployment rate has risen to 10%. But not all sectors of the economy have been suffering equally. In fact, the sector of the economy most supportive of President Obama has not only avoided contraction, but has actually managed to grow instead.

According to a report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) last Friday, in 2009 the number of federal, state and local government employees represented by unions actually rose by 64,000. Coupled with union losses in the private sector economy, 2009 became the first year in American history that a majority of American union members work for the government. Specifically, 52% of all union members now work for the federal, state or local government, up from 49% in 2008. Or, to better illustrate these statistics: three times more union members work in the Post Office than in the auto industry.

So what? Why should Americans care if unions are now dominated by workers who get their paychecks from governments, instead of workers who get their paychecks from private firms? There’s one simple reason: private firms face competition; governments don’t.

Collective bargaining, the anti-trust exemption at the heart of a union’s power, was created to help workers seize their “fair share” of business profits. But if a union ends up extracting a contract from a private firm that eats up too much of the profits, then that firm will be unable to reinvest those profits and will lose out to competitors. But when a union extracts a generous contract from a government, the answer is always higher taxes or borrowing to pay for the bloated spending. And make no mistake: unionized government worker compensation is bloated.

As Heritage fellow James Sherk notes “[t]he average worker for a state or local government earns $39.83 an hour in wages and benefits compared to $27.49 an hour in the private sector. While over 80 percent of state and local workers have pensions, just 50 percent of private-sector workers do. These differences remain after controlling for education, skills and demographics.”

Unionized government employees not only want to keep their bloated compensation packages, but their leaders are desperate for more members and more union dues. That is why public-sector unions have become a fierce lobbying force for higher taxes and more spending across the country. Organized labor once fought against taxes and regulations that impeded the economic interests of their employers, but now they are in alliance with environmentalists pushing private sector and economy-crippling cap-and-trade legislation.

It’s worth noting that the BLS did not count the United Auto Workers working for General Motors and Chrysler as unionized government employees. But perhaps they should have. Our country will share their fate unless something is done about unionized government power.

And the greater the number of people working in government jobs, the more voters there are whose interest lies in keeping the Party of Big Government in power.

It’s hard to reverse socialism.

Tariq Ramadan is the General of Soft Jihad. For years he persisted in trying to get into the United States, and was sensibly refused entry.

Now, just when the weakness and incompetence of the Obama administration’s dealings with jihadists have been direfully exposed, and are being most angrily criticized, this Supremo of the Islamic campaign to conquer the world is suddenly allowed in, by order of Hillary Clinton.

Tariq Ramadan’s particular role is to direct Islamic conquest not by violence but by means of mass immigration and propaganda. He has defended wife-beating and all the cruelties of sharia, including stoning to death. Now he may freely spread his poisonous message in the United States to advance his menacing mission of subjugation.

From the Weekly Standard:

In a controversial move, the Obama administration has decided to lift Tariq Ramadan’s ban from the United States. Who is Tariq Ramadan? By birth, he is the grandson of Hassan al Banna – the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). By word and deed, he is today a leading member of the European branch of the MB.

The MB is the mother organization for some of the terrorist groups that became part of al Qaeda’s core, including Ayman al Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Osama bin Laden himself was first wooed to the dark side by Muslim Brothers teaching in Saudi Arabia. The MB has also spawned other hardcore jihadist organizations, including Hamas. While the MB’s descendents have publicly disagreed over tactics at times (for example, Zawahiri has taken issue with Hamas’s participation in Palestinian elections), they still share the same long-term strategic vision: the re-establishment of an Islamic Caliphate capable of ruling the Muslim world and challenging the West. And that is what Tariq Ramadan believes in too.

Douglas Farah provides more information:

The lifting of the ban, ordered by Secretary of State Clinton, is a significant victory for the Brotherhood, who has sought to frame the issue of Ramadan’s exclusion as one of academic freedom rather one of national security.

Ramadan was ecstatic, saying on his blog:

Today’s decision reflects the Obama administration’s willingness to reopen the United States to the rest of the world, and to permit critical debate. Coming after nearly six years of inquiry and investigation, Secretary Clinton’s order confirms what I have affirmed and reaffirmed from day one: the first accusations of terrorist connections (subsequently dropped), then donations to Palestinian solidarity groups, were nothing more than a pretense to prohibit me from speaking critically about American government policy on American soil. The decision brings to an end a dark period in American politics that saw security considerations invoked to block critical debate through a policy of exclusion and baseless allegation. Today I am delighted at the decision. …

A rock star in the European Muslim scene, Ramadan, despite weak academic credentials, has been offered a teaching position at Notre Dame University….

This is typical of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is eager to use the freedoms that would never exist under the caliphate it so desires to create, in order to promote its totalitarian vision. It demands the right to be heard while being unequivocal in its unwillingness to view as equal anyone who does not embrace its view radical Islamism. While it is willing to use the democratic process to achieve its goals, often putting it at odds with militantly violent groups such as al Qaeda, in the end the Brotherhood and Osama bin Laden share an identical vision of what the world should look like under Allah’s rule.