Shocking information on how US homeland security and anti-terrorism policy has been designed by the Islamic jihadist enemies themselves, is provided by Clare M. Lopez, a professor at the Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, who writes this plain-speaking article for Human Events:

Counterterrorism policy is being formulated under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), the lead international jihadist organization charged with “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…” It’s important to note that the objectives of the Muslim Brotherhood coincide exactly with those of al Qaeda and every other Islamic jihadist organization in the world today: re-establishment of the caliphate/imamate and imposition of Shari’a (Islamic law) over the entire world. …

Former North Carolina State Senator Larry Shaw, elected CAIR Board Chairman in March 2009 stated that he “looks forward to partnering with the Obama administration…” In case anyone failed to notice, CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) terror funding case and an acknowledged affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood. So, just how close is that partnership?

The policy implications of Brotherhood influence are both startling and evident. For example, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano sets the tone for the Obama administration view of Islamic jihad, but in April 2009, she rejected any notion that the enemy is either Islamic or a jihadi. Absurdly, she even refused to even use the word “terror,” instead preferring the inane “man-made disaster.” She was joined in planting the collective U.S. national security leadership head firmly in the sand by senior counterterrorism advisor to the president, John Brennan, who, apparently oblivious of Islamic doctrine and law, claimed in August 2009 that the meaning of jihad is to “. . . purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal.”

Following the foiled Christmas Day airliner bombing, Brennan made a frenzied round of the Sunday talk shows, shocking most of us with the off-hand announcement that a plea deal was “on the table” for Abdulmutallab (who lawyered up and shut up the moment he’d been Mirandized). Treating Islamic jihad as a legal problem or as though it doesn’t exist cripples U.S. national security policy making. 

Where did such ideas come from? How could our most senior officials entrusted with the defense of national security be so far off the tracks? It matters critically, because policy executed in ignorance of the essential linkage between Islamic doctrine and terrorism is bound to miss warning signals that involve Muslim clerics, mosques, teaching, and texts. A key indicator about our counterterrorism officials’ failures may be found in their advisors: their jihadi and Muslim Brotherhood advisors.

The inability of the National Counterterrorism Center (“NCTC”) to connect the dots is no accident. It is not meant to connect the dots. In the summer of 2008, the NCTC organized a conference on U.S. Counter-Radicalization Strategy. According to a 4 January 2010 posting by Patrick Poole at Pajamas Media, one of the leading speakers at that conference was Yasir Qadhi, a featured instructor at the AlMaghrib Institute in Houston, Texas. But by his own public admission, Yasir Qadhi was on the U.S. terror watch list! 

Yes, a key speaker for an NCTC discussion about Counter-Radicalization Strategy is on the terror watch list. He’s obviously there for good reasons. For one thing, Qadhi’s Ilmquest media company featured audio CD sets of sermons by al Qaeda cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, on its website and for sale at Ilmquest seminars. Yes, that al-Awlaki — the one linked to both Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Muslim Ft. Hood shooter, and Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian Muslim would-be Christmas airline bomber. 

To be sure, enemy influence within the Intelligence Community didn’t begin in 2009. In fact, the blueprint for the Muslim Brotherhood information warfare operation against the West goes back to a 1981 MB document called “The Project” that was discovered in a raid in Switzerland. More recently, the FBI discovered the MB’s 1991 U.S. Manifesto in a 2004 raid, a manifesto that not only confirmed the existence of the Brotherhood in the U.S., but outlined its organizational structure and agenda in this country.

The dozens of groups listed as associates in that document include a number who’ve succeeded in forging close relationships inside the structures of U.S. national security. One of them is the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA, another unindicted co-conspirator in the HLF trial). The FBI itself has maintained a longstanding liaison relationship with ISNA officials and placed ads in its monthly publication seeking Muslim applicants to become agents. A top FBI lawyer named Valerie Caproni joined senior ISNA official Louay Safi on a 2008 panel discussion at Yale University for a discussion entitled “Behind the Blindfold of Justice: Security, Individual Rights, & Minority Communities After 9/11.” Worse yet, in the wake of the horrific November 2009 military jihad assault at Ft. Hood that took fourteen lives and left dozens injured, it was revealed that Louay Safi was at Ft. Hood providing seminar presentations about Islam to U.S. troops about to deploy to Afghanistan. That’s an amazing record of successful penetration. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

As noted above, the influence of the enemy extends to the very words we use to describe that enemy and his campaign of conquest. … Back in 2008, the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued lexicon guidance to their employees, counseling avoidance of words like “jihad” or “ummah” or “Caliphate” when describing the enemy. They refused to identify the Muslim American sources who’d advised them on their decisions.

But it is enlightening to note the list of Muslim Brotherhood front groups that endorsed the vocabulary list once it had been issued: the Muslim American Society (MAS — founded by the Muslim Brotherhood); Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC — which lobbies to remove Hamas, Palestinian Jihad, and Hizballah from the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations list); ISNA; and CAIR. When Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee, led by Congressman Peter Hoekstra, proposed an amendment to the 2009 Intelligence funding bill that would have prohibited the Intelligence Community “from adopting speech codes that encumber accurately describing the radical jihadist terrorists that attacked America and continue to threaten the homeland”, the Democratic majority rejected it outright.

Congressional Democrats would appear to be thoroughly influenced by the MB …

These are the Jihad wars, and they are nearly 1400 years old. The U.S. has only been confronting Islamic jihadis since our 18th century naval campaigns against the so-called Barbary pirates but liberal democracy will not see the 22nd century if we do not acknowledge and confront this enemy here and now in the 21st. Until and unless the United States proves capable of appointing and electing officials to the top ranks of our national security leadership who both understand and reject the influence of Islamic jihad groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, our country will be incapable of effective defense against either kinetic or stealth jihad attack.

A libertarian’s wish list: small government; no welfare; simple tax laws; a low flat rate of income tax; no capital gains tax; no estate tax.

But what America has is big government getting bigger, more intrusive, more controlling. The main instrument of its tyranny is the IRS, which the socialist regime is making ever more powerful.

This IBD editorial announces that within three years it will be illegal for anyone to help you prepare your taxes unless that person has been licensed by the federal government.

As if the Internal Revenue Service doesn’t have enough power, the agency says it will regulate tax preparers. And ObamaCare gives it even more clout.

Eric Hoffer, the great working class scourge of statist power, noted in his 1955 book, “The Passionate State of Mind,” that “There is a large measure of totalitarianism even in the freest of free societies.”

In America, the power to tax has always been recognized as the deadliest tool of the tyrant. Edmund Burke, the great British parliamentarian, in 1775 said the American colonies’ “love of liberty” was “fixed and attached on this specific point of taxing.”

According to this early sympathizer to the American cause, “Liberty might be safe or might be endangered in twenty other particulars without their being much pleased or alarmed.” But on taxes, “Here they felt its pulse, and as they found that beat they thought themselves sick or sound.”

Considering Americans’ innate sense of the relationship between taxation and freedom, it’s startling to read international taxation expert and legal historian Charles Adams’ account of the evolution of income tax collection.

As Adams points out in his history of taxes from antiquity to the modern era, “For Good and Evil,” “in the tax system of the 1950s no bank informed the IRS about customers’ affairs. Interest was not reported, withdrawals of cash were not reported” and neither were real estate sales, stock and dividend transactions, nor independent work now required by the 1099 form.

“Only wages were reported,” Adams points out, “and that was for the taxpayer’s benefit in order to claim a refund.” An IRS official would routinely “begin an audit with the comment that ours was an honor system, which is required in a free society.”

The honor is long gone — because the American people have felt the system’s pulse, diagnosing it sick as massive government wields illegitimate powers.

Enter IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman, who announced Monday that within three years it will cease being legal to have your taxes prepared by someone unlicensed by the federal government. …

This comes when the Democrats’ health reform will be giving the IRS unprecedented new powers, such as judging which health plans are legal and tracking down those who try going without health coverage.

Most of us want to believe we enjoy the freest free society in history. But why is it that while we want the tax collector to have less power, the march of time always seems to give him more?

Cheers for this lusty shout against politicians and bureaucrats, the power they have over our lives.

It rings to us like the true voice of America which has been silent or subdued too long.

By Ernest S. Christian and Gary A Robbins in Investor’s Business Daily:

No matter who he is, the president of the United States has far too many powers over our lives and livelihoods. So do members of Congress.

Even if the holders of these public offices were capable of correctly performing such a vast multiplicity of complex tasks, which they aren’t, and even if their intentions were always honorable, which they often aren’t, it is absurd that a handful of exceedingly ordinary, highly fallible people should be telling 300 million Americans what to do, say and think — and even more ridiculous that we let them.

Are they smarter than we are? Are they morally superior? Are they better able to run our affairs than we are? Are their intentions toward us better than our own? Do they make us better or better off? Of course not. Just the opposite. Their record of failure is manifest.

Why should we pay them exorbitant salaries to ruin the economy and abridge our liberties? The current incumbents should be fired. Their jobs should be downgraded in power and scope. The staff of nearly 3 million civilian bureaucrats should be redeployed.

Those of us who add value to the national balance sheet should not be ruled over by those who don’t. We should not have to stand in line and ask permission to enjoy [now comes the only bit we don’t cheer] the inalienable rights given us by our Creator [we would substitute ‘liberty’].

Civil governance in America is not supposed to be intrusive, much less oppressive. Left alone, all we really need is for government to perform a few simple jobs under our close supervision and on a strict budget. Yet we are painfully bound from head to foot in reams of expensive federal red tape that our captors in Washington pull ever tighter.

With tens of millions of federal interventions occurring every minute, the machinery of government is so vast and complex that it can no longer be operated safely — especially not by politicians inured to the daily process of destroying lives, jobs and wealth.

The politicians we put in charge of our lives and livelihoods are by no means the best and brightest people among us. Typically they are meddlesome by nature and given to high-risk experimentations, using us like guinea pigs. Most are inveterate spendthrifts.

America’s presidents and members of Congress are selected by election — but elections are not divine rites that make the unqualified qualified or convert ordinary individuals into paragons of virtue and superior intellect.

One of the sentimental theories dear to the leftist heart is that poverty causes crime. It is plainly untrue: most poor people are not criminals. Ideological levelers use it as an excuse for forcing whole societies into egalitarian straightjackets. Because the theory, or piety, is useful to them, they hang on to it however often and thoroughly it’s shown to be wrong. If they were right, crime would sink wherever poverty is alleviated by welfare provision, but what happens is the opposite: crime rises with the rise of welfare dependency.

What really does reduce crime – though socialists find the fact so intolerable they will continue to deny it in the teeth of all evidence – is the capture, conviction, imprisonment and punishment of criminals.

Heather Mac Donald, always clear thinking and accurate in research, demonstrates this in an article in the Wall Street Journal. The only thing she says that we would politely correct is that the theory arose in the 1960s (which was indeed a source of many stupid theories). Actually, it was big with ivory-tower intellectuals in the early twentieth century, and probably dates from even further back than that.

She writes:

The recession of 2008-09 has undercut one of the most destructive social theories that came out of the 1960s: the idea that the root cause of crime lies in income inequality and social injustice. As the economy started shedding jobs in 2008, criminologists and pundits predicted that crime would shoot up, since poverty, as the “root causes” theory holds, begets criminals. Instead, the opposite happened. Over seven million lost jobs later, crime has plummeted to its lowest level since the early 1960s. The consequences of this drop for how we think about social order are significant.

The notion that crime is an understandable reaction to poverty and racism took hold in the early 1960s. Sociologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin argued that juvenile delinquency was essentially a form of social criticism. Poor minority youth come to understand that the American promise of upward mobility is a sham, after a bigoted society denies them the opportunity to advance. These disillusioned teens then turn to crime out of thwarted expectations.

The theories put forward by Cloward, who spent his career at Columbia University, and Ohlin, who served presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Carter, provided an intellectual foundation for many Great Society-era programs. From the Mobilization for Youth on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1963 through the federal Office of Economic Opportunity and a host of welfare, counseling and job initiatives, their ideas were turned into policy.

If crime was a rational response to income inequality, the thinking went, government can best fight it through social services and wealth redistribution, not through arrests and incarceration. Even law enforcement officials came to embrace the root causes theory, which let them off the hook for rising lawlessness. Through the late 1980s, the FBI’s annual national crime report included the disclaimer that “criminal homicide is largely a societal problem which is beyond the control of the police.” Policing, it was understood, can only respond to crime after the fact; preventing it is the domain of government welfare programs.

The 1960s themselves offered a challenge to the poverty-causes-crime thesis. Homicides rose 43%, despite an expanding economy and a surge in government jobs for inner-city residents. The Great Depression also contradicted the idea that need breeds predation, since crime rates dropped during that prolonged crisis. The academy’s commitment to root causes apologetics nevertheless persisted. Andrew Karmen of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice echoed Cloward and Ohlin in 2000 in his book “New York Murder Mystery.” Crime, he wrote, is “a distorted form of social protest.” And as the current recession deepened, liberal media outlets called for more government social programs to fight the coming crime wave. In late 2008, the New York Times urged President Barack Obama to crank up federal spending on after-school programs, social workers, and summer jobs. “The economic crisis,” the paper’s editorialists wrote, “has clearly created the conditions for more crime and more gangs—among hopeless, jobless young men in the inner cities.”

Even then crime patterns were defying expectations. And by the end of 2009, the purported association between economic hardship and crime was in shambles. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, homicide dropped 10% nationwide in the first six months of 2009; violent crime dropped 4.4% and property crime dropped 6.1%. Car thefts are down nearly 19%. The crime plunge is sharpest in many areas that have been hit the hardest by the housing collapse. Unemployment in California is 12.3%, but homicides in Los Angeles County, the Los Angeles Times reported recently, dropped 25% over the course of 2009. Car thefts there are down nearly 20%.

The recession crime free fall continues a trend of declining national crime rates that began in the 1990s, during a very different economy. The causes of that long-term drop are hotly disputed, but an increase in the number of people incarcerated had a large effect on crime in the last decade and continues to affect crime rates today, however much anti-incarceration activists deny it. The number of state and federal prisoners grew fivefold between 1977 and 2008, from 300,000 to 1.6 million.

The spread of data-driven policing has also contributed to the 2000s’ crime drop. At the start of the recession, the two police chiefs who confidently announced that their cities’ crime rates would remain recession-proof were Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. As New York Police Commissioner in the mid-1990s, Mr. Bratton pioneered the intensive use of crime data to determine policing strategies and to hold precinct commanders accountable—a process known as Compstat. Commissioner Kelly has continued Mr. Bratton’s revolutionary policies, leading to New York’s stunning 16-year 77% crime drop. The two police leaders were true to their word. In 2009, the city of L.A. saw a 17% drop in homicides, an 8% drop in property crimes, and a 10% drop in violent crimes. In New York, homicides fell 19%, to their lowest level since reliable records were first kept in 1963.

The Compstat mentality is the opposite of root causes excuse-making; it holds that policing can and must control crime for the sake of urban economic viability. More and more police chiefs have adopted the Compstat philosophy of crime-fighting and the information-based policing techniques that it spawned. Their success in lowering crime shows that the government can control antisocial behavior and provide public safety through enforcing the rule of law. Moreover, the state has the moral right and obligation to do so, regardless of economic conditions or income inequality…

The recession could still affect crime rates if cities cut their police forces and states start releasing prisoners early. Both forms of cost-saving would be self-defeating. Public safety is the precondition for thriving urban life. In 1990s New York, crime did not drop because the economy improved; rather, the city’s economy revived because crime was cut in half…

It should always be remembered that the only absolutely necessary function of government is protection: of the nation by armed defense against foreign attack, and of individuals by means of the law.

Lending to borrowers who could not afford to buy homes was the root cause of the economic collapse which has plunged America into debt for generations to come.

Lending to borrowers who cannot afford to buy homes continues as before under the Obama administration.

Leading the dance of corruption is Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The lords of the dance are Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.

The leader of the band is Pay Czar Kenneth Feinberg.

Obama calls the tune.

Today at Townhall, Bruce Bialosky writes this about it:

[Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac], which together own or guarantee over one half of home mortgages, and which had previously been injected with a $111 billion bailout, received an unexpected Christmas present from the Obama Administration: an executive order, issued in the dark of the night … The Treasury announced they were eliminating the $400 billion limit available to these two entities – in essence giving them license to fritter away as much money as they want while the American people (and their grandchildren) pick up the tab…

The story gets even better. The top executives are in line to receive $6 million compensation packages for 2009. Apparently, the fact that Fannie Mae lost $56.9 billion and Freddie Mac has lost $14.1 billion in the first 9 months of 2009 did not stop the Obama Administration from approving these payments. The Treasury claims that the compensation meets the guidelines set out by Kenneth Feinberg, the Pay Czar; however, it appears that the minimum salaries of $900,000 far exceed the $500,000 limit that Feinberg had previously established.

Compensation of Fannie and Freddie executives has been suspicious for a long time. Typically, executives would be given huge pay packages, and then funnel some of the money back to their favorite politicians to impede the oversight process. Franklin Raines and James A. Johnson, two directors who received enormous sums of money, ran Fannie Mae into the ground only to be rewarded by the Obama Administration until political pressure forced them into private life.

Skepticism abounds as to why the Obama Administration would make such a move when we already have a $289 billion commitment for additional funding to underwrite losses from the twin entities. Treasury Secretary Geithner claimed that they just wanted to stabilize the mortgage market, but, if this was of such great importance and urgency, why was it done so secretively?

What seems to be missing is major reform of the lending practices. There’s no evidence that they’ve become more vigilant in their loan procedures, or more attentive to the credit-worthiness of the borrowers. In fact, it seems pretty clear that they have resumed their lending habits of old.

Proportional fault has never been placed on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the subprime loan crisis.

Because these entities have been protected by Barney Frank in the House and Christopher Dodd in the Senate, the two lenders have escaped the kind of brutal public scrutiny visited upon banks and other lenders. While bankers have been on the hot seat and skewered by late night comedians, the people who run these behemoths have escaped unfazed.

Today, in the Wall Street Journal, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, law professor J. Kenneth Blackwell, and legal analyst Kenneth A. Klukowski write a clear, informative article on why the health-care bill is unconstitutional.

Read it in full here.

Excerpt:

President Obama’s health-care bill is now moving toward final passage. The policy issues may be coming to an end, but the legal issues are certain to continue because key provisions of this dangerous legislation are unconstitutional. Legally speaking, this legislation creates a target-rich environment. We will focus on three of its more glaring constitutional defects.

First, the Constitution does not give Congress the power to require that Americans purchase health insurance. Congress must be able to point to at least one of its powers listed in the Constitution as the basis of any legislation it passes. None of those powers justifies the individual insurance mandate…

It is one thing … for Congress to regulate economic activity in which individuals choose to engage; it is another to require that individuals engage in such activity. That is not a difference in degree, but instead a difference in kind. It is a line that Congress has never crossed and the courts have never sanctioned…

A second constitutional defect of the Reid bill passed in the Senate involves the deals he cut to secure the votes of individual senators… This selective spending targeted at certain states runs afoul of the general welfare clause.

A third constitutional defect in this ObamaCare legislation is its command that states establish such things as benefit exchanges, which will require state legislation and regulations. This is not a condition for receiving federal funds, which would still leave some kind of choice to the states. No, this legislation requires states to establish these exchanges or says that the Secretary of Health and Human Services will step in and do it for them. It renders states little more than subdivisions of the federal government.

This violates the letter, the spirit, and the interpretation of our federal-state form of government… [T]he Constitution forbids the federal government from commandeering any branch of state government to administer a federal program. That is, by drafting and by deliberate design, exactly what this legislation would do…

This hardly exhausts the list of constitutional problems with this legislation, which would take the federal government into uncharted political and legal territory…

America’s founders intended the federal government to have limited powers and that the states have an independent sovereign place in our system of government. The Obama/Reid/Pelosi legislation to take control of the American health-care system is the most sweeping and intrusive federal program ever devised. If the federal government can do this, then it can do anything, and the limits on government power that our liberty requires will be more myth than reality.

It’s absurd to keep repeating, every time a Muslim tries to kill as many non-Muslims as possible in Islam’s war against the rest of us, that ‘most Muslims’ are not doing it. There are well over a billion Muslims in the world, at some estimates as many as 1.4 billion. If only 10% of them actively engage in violent jihad, that’s a huge horde. Islam demands that all Muslims engage in the jihad, either violently or by assisting the actively violent. Islam itself is the cause of the war.

Islam does not deserve respect just because it is a religion. Quite the opposite. Even if it were a ‘religion of peace’, which it explicitly is not, there’d be nothing respectable about it. What is respectable about belief in the supernatural? But its being a creed of massacre and cruelty in the name of its vicious beliefs makes it positively inimical to civilization, liberty, tolerance, peace, everything that makes life supportable. Islam is the enemy of mankind.

The Islamic hordes of death are conquering Europe by slowly repopulating it as the indigenous Europeans die out. From there, especially from Britain, they are striking against America. The president of the United States does not want to admit this is happening – a wilful blindness that greatly increases the peril.

Mark Steyn, who was one of the first to raise the alarm about Islam’s conquest of Europe by demographic means, writes:

It’s good to know the President has abandoned his laughable assurances that the Pantybomber was an “isolated extremist”. After all, when the leader of the global hyperpower says things that any reasonably informed person at home and abroad knows are complete twaddle, he makes his country look stupid to the world. But I think we’re still missing the larger point here.

So the President’s conceded Mr Abdulmuttalab was in Yemen. Good. But, by the time a guy gets on the plane to Sana’a, he’s already on board for jihad. All they do in Yemen is the training. So where was he radicalized and recruited and when did he decide to embrace a life of terror? … Whom should the traveling public thank for these impositions? The 9/11 killers were mostly Saudi. But the Shoebomber was a British subject. So were the Heathrow plotters. And the Pantybomber was educated in British schools – first in Togo; then at University College, London – and there is plenty of evidence he was radicalized while in the UK. …

That ought to prompt astonishment – and great shame in Britons. Yet Timothy Garton Ash, Hoover panjandrum and eminent British complacenik, wrote in The Guardian only three weeks ago:

‘Not all Muslims, all of the time, will be able to support all these minimum essentials of a modern free society. There is a real tension between some of the essentials (for instance, the equal rights and dignity of homosexuals) and what is habitually taught even in mainstream, conservative Muslim communities. But most British Muslims, most of the time, will support most of them.’

Even if that’s true (and it’s by no means clear that it is), is that enough? I said a few years back that Britain had been so hollowed out by Islamic radicals that it was becoming Somalia with chip shops. Mr Abdulmutallab supposedly got the ol’ jihad fever while at university. I see The New York Times reports the remarkable statistic that one-fifth of students at British universities are Muslim. As Professor Garton Ash would say, most British Muslims most of the time will be most unlikely to self-detonate over most American cities. So that’s okay, right? Up to a point. A poll by the Centre for Social Cohesion found that one-third of Muslim students in Britain believe killing in the name of religion is justified and are in favor of a global caliphate. That’s a lot of potential airline tickets.

Thanks to one of our (highly critical) readers who sent it to us, here is a cheerful message for the new year, written by Howard Golganov:

THINK VERY SERIOUSLY ABOUT THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT:

No politician has ever done America and the Free World a greater SERVICE, than has Barack Hussein Obama and the FOOLS who elected him.

HERE’S WHY I BELIEVE IN WHAT I HAVE JUST WRITTEN:

For more than a couple of generations, North America has been sliding slowly but surely towards creeping socialism, where even our ‘pretend’ Conservatives have been playing the game.

Two perfect examples include President George W Bush and Canada’s Prime Minister Prime Minister Stephen Harper, both of whom increased spending, their respective debts, and the size of their respective governments.

Even ‘pretend’ Conservative leaders have been chipping away at INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS, while imposing more and more regulations and bureaucracy.

Had Barack Hussein Obama not come along when he did, this trend to the LEFT, especially to the FAR LEFT would have continued without any REAL abatement, option, or alternative in sight.

But, because of Obama and the extraordinarily horrible people he is aligned with inside and outside of government, the shift to the LEFT that would have taken much longer has in fact EXPLODED overnight.

Had the move to the LEFT continued unabated, I sincerely believe that not only would our economies have crashed, but also, we would have lost our individual RIGHTS, which would have been irretrievable without some form of serious conflict.

Perhaps even a civil war between the RIGHT and the LEFT.

But, this SHOCK THERAPY courtesy of Obama has been a clarion wake-up call. And because of it, strong Conservative leaders have emerged before it became too late.

Even MODERATE LIBERALS are having serious sober second thoughts about the direction in which the LEFT are dragging the USA. So much so, that even they can see the edge of the precipice Obama and his coterie of co-conspirators are running hell bent to jump off of.

Here is a prediction that takes very little prognosticative skills:

Not ONLY will Obama go down in history as the WORST President ever. Even making Carter look less horrible than he actually was. Obama will go down as the MOST HATED PRESIDENT EVER.

Because of Obama, who has managed to screw everything up in less than one full year, making his LEFT base upset, losing all of his moderate and independent supporters, taking a Nobel Peace Prize while making war, and bringing America and the entire world to the brink of bankruptcy, THE AMERICAN LEFT WILL BE CRUSHED for a long time to come.

Sometimes we just don’t know how good we have it until something REALLY BAD happens to take it all away. Obama is that something REALLY BAD that has happened.

So, to all of you folk who write to me in tones of DESPAIR – Despair not.

HAPPY DAYS WILL SOON ENOUGH BE HERE AGAIN.

Nice. We follow his argument and we hope he’s right. Only we’re not so sure about the strong Conservative leaders he says have emerged. Who are they?

If he means, for instance, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, they’re doing a splendid job as providers of information that the mainstream media would rather keep hidden; and they are certainly leaders of public opinion which can influence policy decisions; but they are not likely to become policy makers themselves. If he means Sarah Palin he may be right. Anyone else?

Paul Rahe writes at Power Line:

If there is an alternative to Islamic revivalism on the horizon, it is to be found in Iraq. The simple fact that there are free elections in that country, that there is open debate, and that it is drifting in the direction of genuine prosperity — this stirs dissatisfaction of an entirely different sort in the Arab world — and, as is abundantly evident in Iran, it does so in the larger Muslim world as well. As time passes and the dust settles, George W. Bush may come to look more and more like a hero — both in the Arab world and here in the United States. For, if the Iraqis remain steadfast and succeed, it is to their example that those fed up with Islamic revivalism will look, and it will be remembered just how adamant the second Bush was in his support for the democratic aspirations of the Iraqi people.

We have shown appreciation for Paul Rahe’s wisdom in the past, but with this, much as we’d like to agree with him since we were supporters of George Bush’s regime-changing war in Iraq, we find reason to dissent.

Again it is Diana West who explains why ‘democratic’ Iraq is no model for the rest of the Islamic world:

I don’t know how to candy-coat reality: Post-surge Iraq is a state of increasing repression, endemic corruption, religious and ethnic persecution and encroaching Sharia. Recent media reports flag just some of these glaring truths that American elites, civilian and military, seem to shy away from. …

In November, Reuters highlighted the government crackdown on the media via lawsuits against criticism, and laws enabling the government to close media outlets that “encourage terrorism, violence,” and — here’s a handy catch-all — “tensions.” There are new rules to license satellite trucks, censor books and control Internet cafes. “The measures evoke memories of … the laws used to muzzle (journalism) under Saddam Hussein,” Reuters writes.

In December, the British paper The Observer reported that hundreds of Iraqi police and soldiers descended on Baghdad’s 300 nightclubs where they “slapped owners’ faces, scattered their patrons and dancing girls, ripped down posters advertising upcoming acts and ordered alcohol removed from the shelves.” The official reason? No licenses. But, the paper reports, “the reality is that a year-long renaissance in Baghdad’s nightlife may be over as this increasingly conservative city takes on a hard-line religious identity.”  …

[O]ne particularly shocking, unintended consequence of U.S. involvement has been the religious “cleansing” of Iraq’s ancient Christian populations. In 2003, 1 million Christians lived in Iraq. Six years later, after successive waves of violence and intimidation largely unchecked by either Iraqi government action or U.S. intercession, more than 500,000 Christians have fled the country. It is a crisis that inspired Christian leaders to assemble in Baghdad in December for a conference piteously titled: “Do Christians Have a Future in Iraq?”

This anti-Christian persecution is a large part of why the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended in December 2008 that the State Department name Iraq a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) — its dread Saddam-era designation. (Recommendation denied.) In May, to strengthen human rights in Iraq, the commission’s Iraq report included suggested amendments to Iraq’s constitution, which, not incidentally, boil down to abolishing the constitutional supremacy of Islamic law. (And yes, U.S. legal advisers helped write this same Sharia-supreme governing document.)

For example, the commission suggested deleting the line in Article 2 that says no law may contradict “the established provisions of Islam.” It suggested revising the “guarantee of `the Islamic identity of the majority’ to make certain that this identity is not used to justify violations” of human rights. It also suggested that “the free and informed consent of both parties (be) required to move a personal status case to the religious law system,” and “that religious court rulings (be) subject to final review under Iraq’s civil law.” Another suggestion was to remove “the ability of making appointments to the Federal Supreme Court based on training in Islamic jurisprudence alone.”

Good ideas — if religious freedom is the objective. But it is not the objective in Iraq, or in other Islamic countries. Which should make the United States, founded and defined by such freedom, look before nation-building, and ask: Do we really want Americans to “surge” and risk death to build nations such as this to stand as monuments to “victory”?

Here is the 2009 list of the Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians released by Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption:

Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT): This marks two years in a row for Senator Dodd, who made the 2008 “Ten Most Corrupt” list for his corrupt relationship with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and for accepting preferential treatment and loan terms from Countrywide Financial, a scandal which still dogs him. In 2009, the scandals kept coming for the Connecticut Democrat. In 2009, Judicial Watch filed a Senate ethics complaint against Dodd for undervaluing a property he owns in Ireland on his Senate Financial Disclosure forms. Judicial Watch’s complaint forced Dodd to amend the forms. However, press reports suggest the property to this day remains undervalued. Judicial Watch also alleges in the complaint that Dodd obtained a sweetheart deal for the property in exchange for his assistance in obtaining a presidential pardon (during the Clinton administration) and other favors for a long-time friend and business associate. The false financial disclosure forms were part of the cover-up. Dodd remains the head of the Senate Banking Committee.

Senator John Ensign (R-NV): A number of scandals popped up in 2009 involving public officials who conducted illicit affairs, and then attempted to cover them up with hush payments and favors, an obvious abuse of power. … Ensign admitted in June to an extramarital affair with the wife of one of his staff members, who then allegedly obtained special favors from the Nevada Republican in exchange for his silence. According to The New York Times: “The Justice Department and the Senate Ethics Committee are expected to conduct preliminary inquiries into whether Senator John Ensign violated federal law or ethics rules as part of an effort to conceal an affair with the wife of an aide…” The former staffer, Douglas Hampton, began to lobby Mr. Ensign’s office immediately upon leaving his congressional job, despite the fact that he was subject to a one-year lobbying ban. Ensign seems to have ignored the law and allowed Hampton lobbying access to his office as a payment for his silence about the affair. (These are potentially criminal offenses.) It looks as if Ensign misused his public office (and taxpayer resources) to cover up his sexual shenanigans.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA): Judicial Watch is investigating a $12 million TARP cash injection provided to the Boston-based OneUnited Bank at the urging of Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank. As reported in the January 22, 2009, edition of the Wall Street Journal, the Treasury Department indicated it would only provide funds to healthy banks to jump-start lending. Not only was OneUnited Bank in massive financial turmoil, but it was also “under attack from its regulators for allegations of poor lending practices and executive-pay abuses, including owning a Porsche for its executives’ use.” Rep. Frank admitted he spoke to a “federal regulator,” and Treasury granted the funds… Moreover, Judicial Watch uncovered documents in 2009 that showed that members of Congress for years were aware that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were playing fast and loose with accounting issues, risk assessment issues and executive compensation issues, even as liberals led by Rep. Frank continued to block attempts to rein in the two Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs)… Frank received $42,350 in campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac between 1989 and 2008. Frank also engaged in a relationship with a Fannie Mae Executive while serving on the House Banking Committee, which has jurisdiction over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner: In 2009, Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner admitted that he failed to pay $34,000 in Social Security and Medicare taxes from 2001-2004 on his lucrative salary at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), an organization with 185 member countries that oversees the global financial system. (Did we mention Geithner now runs the IRS?) It wasn’t until President Obama tapped Geithner to head the Treasury Department that he paid back most of the money, although the IRS kindly waived the hefty penalties. In March 2009, Geithner also came under fire for his handling of the AIG bonus scandal, where the company used $165 million of its bailout funds to pay out executive bonuses, resulting in a massive public backlash. Of course as head of the New York Federal Reserve, Geithner helped craft the AIG deal in September 2008. However, when the AIG scandal broke, Geithner claimed he knew nothing of the bonuses until March 10, 2009. The timing is important. According to CNN: “Although Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told congressional leaders on Tuesday that he learned of AIG’s impending $160 million bonus payments to members of its troubled financial-products unit on March 10, sources tell TIME that the New York Federal Reserve informed Treasury staff that the payments were imminent on Feb. 28. That is ten days before Treasury staffers say they first learned ‘full details’ of the bonus plan, and three days before the [Obama] Administration launched a new $30 billion infusion of cash for AIG.” Throw in another embarrassing disclosure in 2009 that Geithner employed “household help” ineligible to work in the United States, and it becomes clear why the Treasury Secretary has earned a spot on the “Ten Most Corrupt Politicians in Washington” list.

Attorney General Eric Holder: … Judicial Watch strongly opposed Holder because of his terrible ethics record, which includes: obstructing an FBI investigation of the theft of nuclear secrets from Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory; rejecting multiple requests for an independent counsel to investigate alleged fundraising abuses by then-Vice President Al Gore in the Clinton White House; undermining the criminal investigation of President Clinton by Kenneth Starr in the midst of the Lewinsky investigation; and planning the violent raid to seize then-six-year-old Elian Gonzalez at gunpoint in order to return him to Castro’s Cuba. Moreover, there is his soft record on terrorism. Holder bypassed Justice Department procedures to push through Bill Clinton’s scandalous presidential pardons and commutations, including for 16 members of FALN, a violent Puerto Rican terrorist group that orchestrated approximately 120 bombings in the United States, killing at least six people and permanently maiming dozens of others, including law enforcement officers. His record in the current administration is no better. As he did during the Clinton administration, Holder continues to ignore serious incidents of corruption that could impact his political bosses at the White House. For example, Holder has refused to investigate charges that the Obama political machine traded VIP access to the White House in exchange for campaign contributions – a scheme eerily similar to one hatched by Holder’s former boss, Bill Clinton in the 1990s. The Holder Justice Department also came under fire for dropping a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party. …  Holder has also failed to initiate a comprehensive Justice investigation of the notorious organization ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which is closely tied to President Obama. There were allegedly more than 400,000 fraudulent ACORN voter registrations in the 2008 campaign. And then there were the journalist videos catching ACORN Housing workers advising undercover reporters on how to evade tax, immigration, and child prostitution laws. Holder’s controversial decisions on new rights for terrorists and his attacks on previous efforts to combat terrorism remind many of the fact that his former law firm has provided and continues to provide pro bono representation to terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. …

Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL)/ Senator Roland Burris (D-IL): One of the most serious scandals of 2009 involved a scheme by former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich to sell President Obama’s then-vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder. Two men caught smack dab in the middle of the scandal: Senator Roland Burris, who ultimately got the job, and Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, emissaries for Jesse Jackson Jr., named “Senate Candidate A” in the Blagojevich indictment, reportedly offered $1.5 million to Blagojevich during a fundraiser if he named Jackson Jr. to Obama’s seat. Three days later federal authorities arrested Blagojevich. Burris, for his part, apparently lied about his contacts with Blagojevich, who was arrested in December 2008 for trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat. … Burris changed his story five times regarding his contacts with Blagojevich prior to the Illinois governor appointing him to the U.S. Senate. Three of those changing explanations came under oath.

President Barack Obama: During his presidential campaign, President Obama promised to run an ethical and transparent administration. However, in his first year in office, the President has delivered corruption and secrecy, bringing Chicago-style political corruption to the White House. Consider just a few Obama administration “lowlights” from year one: Even before President Obama was sworn into office, he was interviewed by the FBI for a criminal investigation of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s scheme to sell the President’s former Senate seat to the highest bidder. (Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and slumlord Valerie Jarrett, both from Chicago, are also tangled up in the Blagojevich scandal.) Moreover, the Obama administration made the startling claim that the Privacy Act does not apply to the White House. The Obama White House believes it can violate the privacy rights of American citizens without any legal consequences or accountability. President Obama boldly proclaimed that “transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency,” but his administration is addicted to secrecy, stonewalling far too many of Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act requests and is refusing to make public White House visitor logs as federal law requires. The Obama administration turned the National Endowment of the Arts (as well as the agency that runs the AmeriCorps program) into propaganda machines, using tax dollars to persuade “artists” to promote the Obama agenda. According to documents uncovered by Judicial Watch, the idea emerged as a direct result of the Obama campaign and enjoyed White House approval and participation. President Obama has installed a record number of “czars” in positions of power. Too many of these individuals are leftist radicals who answer to no one but the president. And too many of the czars are not subject to Senate confirmation (which raises serious constitutional questions). Under the President’s bailout schemes, the federal government continues to appropriate or control — through fiat and threats — large sectors of the private economy, prompting conservative columnist George Will to write: “The administration’s central activity — the political allocation of wealth and opportunity — is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.” Government-run healthcare and car companies, White House coercion, uninvestigated ACORN corruption, debasing his office to help Chicago cronies, attacks on conservative media and the private sector, unprecedented and dangerous new rights for terrorists, perks for campaign donors – this is Obama’s “ethics” record — and we haven’t even gotten through the first year of his presidency.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): At the heart of the corruption problem in Washington is a sense of entitlement. Politicians believe laws and rules (even the U.S. Constitution) apply to the rest of us but not to them. Case in point: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her excessive and boorish demands for military travel. Judicial Watch obtained documents from the Pentagon in 2008 that suggest Pelosi has been treating the Air Force like her own personal airline. These documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, include internal Pentagon email correspondence detailing attempts by Pentagon staff to accommodate Pelosi’s numerous requests for military escorts and military aircraft as well as the speaker’s 11th hour cancellations and changes. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also came under fire in April 2009, when she claimed she was never briefed about the CIA’s use of the waterboarding technique during terrorism investigations. The CIA produced a report documenting a briefing with Pelosi on September 4, 2002, that suggests otherwise. Judicial Watch also obtained documents, including a CIA Inspector General report, which further confirmed that Congress was fully briefed on the enhanced interrogation techniques. Aside from her own personal transgressions, Nancy Pelosi has ignored serious incidents of corruption within her own party, including many of the individuals on this list. (See Rangel, Murtha, Jesse Jackson, Jr., etc.)

Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) and the rest of the PMA Seven: Rep. John Murtha made headlines in 2009 for all the wrong reasons. The Pennsylvania congressman is under federal investigation for his corrupt relationship with the now-defunct defense lobbyist PMA Group. PMA, founded by a former Murtha associate, has been the congressman’s largest campaign contributor. Since 2002, Murtha has raised $1.7 million from PMA and its clients. And what did PMA and its clients receive from Murtha in return for their generosity? Earmarks — tens of millions of dollars in earmarks. In fact, even with all of the attention surrounding his alleged influence peddling, Murtha kept at it. Following an FBI raid of PMA’s offices earlier in 2009, Murtha continued to seek congressional earmarks for PMA clients, while also hitting them up for campaign contributions. According to The Hill, in April, “Murtha reported receiving contributions from three former PMA clients for whom he requested earmarks in the pending appropriations bills.” When it comes to the PMA scandal, Murtha is not alone. As many as six other Members of Congress are currently under scrutiny according to The Washington Post. They include: Peter J. Visclosky (D-IN.), James P. Moran Jr. (D-VA), Norm Dicks (D-WA.), Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), C.W. Bill Young (R-FL.) and Todd Tiahrt (R-KS.). Of course rather than investigate this serious scandal, according to Roll Call House Democrats circled the wagons, “cobbling together a defense to offer political cover to their rank and file.” The Washington Post also reported in 2009 that Murtha’s nephew received $4 million in Defense Department no-bid contracts …

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY): Rangel, the man in charge of writing tax policy for the entire country, has yet to adequately explain how he could possibly “forget” to pay taxes on $75,000 in rental income he earned from his off-shore rental property. He also faces allegations that he improperly used his influence to maintain ownership of highly coveted rent-controlled apartments in Harlem, and misused his congressional office to fundraise for his private Rangel Center by preserving a tax loophole for an oil drilling company in exchange for funding. On top of all that, Rangel recently amended his financial disclosure reports, which doubled his reported wealth. (He somehow “forgot” about $1 million in assets.) And what did he do when the House Ethics Committee started looking into all of this? He apparently resorted to making “campaign contributions” to dig his way out of trouble. According to WCBS TV, a New York CBS affiliate: “The reigning member of Congress’ top tax committee is apparently ‘wrangling’ other politicos to get him out of his own financial and tax troubles…Since ethics probes began last year the 79-year-old congressman has given campaign donations to 119 members of Congress, including three of the five Democrats on the House Ethics Committee who are charged with investigating him.” Charlie Rangel should not be allowed to remain in Congress, let alone serve as Chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, and he knows it. That’s why he felt the need to disburse campaign contributions to Ethics Committee members and other congressional colleagues.